Apple's iPhone 4.0 software to deliver multitasking support - Page 12

The iPhone already runs many processes in background.

Any application which is well written, could safely run in background with an adverse effect on battery or foreground performance.

The problem is simply one of trust. Apple cannot affordably vet all third party applications for technical compliance.

C.

Focus on apps that will benefit the user from multitasking instead of Monopoly. It is rather sad that arguements against multi tasking are always made on such weak platforms. Beyound the fact that there are very useful apps that could benefit from multi tasking you have to also realize that such facilities gave zero impact if not being used.

Further if given s greater control over running apps user might be free to disable some of the back ground Apple apps that are in effect a waste for many. SMS for one and even E-Mail or Safari could also go. These apps consume precious RAM and CPU cycles that would be better targetted at user apps.

I'm actually surprised that Apple hasn't given users more control over these apps. Especially considering that RAM space is a critical issue on iPhone. All this focus on the negativity with respect to multi tasking glosses over completely the wide ranging benefits one could enjoy if the facility was less constrained.

For example take Safari for example. One of the great features of iPhone, but it can suck the battery life out of iPhone if left on a page that auto updates often. Give the users the ability to completely close the app and the issue goes away.


Dave

I'm getting tired of all these comments implying that multitasking isn't there. IPhone OS has multitasked since day one.

While I would love to see GCD and even OpenCL come to iPhone that has nothing to do with multi tasking as iPhone already does that. GCD is nothing more than a thread pool and benefits the most from multi core hardware.

While I'm sure that iPhone OS will continue to adapt code from Mac OS I'm not sure you understand SL.

They don't need GCD to do that. Rather it is done with the task manager where they already exercise control over the number of user apps running. Besides you would not want to overload GCD with a bunch of extraneous management code. The thing that makes GCD work is the very quick code with low overhead.

Let me just say I don't believe that will be the approach Apple takes. Now that doesn't mean that GCD and the other features of SL aren't coming to iPhone, it is just that they will come to iPhone for the same reason they did on Mac OS. I'm actually expecting Apple to offer up a couple of solutions for background apps. Some won't work well on iPhone such as a dashboard panel that gets a small percentage of CPU time. Others such as the use of a dock for process management will operate more or less equally across all hardware.

By the way I don't see much sense in GCD until we have multi core processors to really take advantage of the feature. Which leads to the question what is in A4.



Dave

This is what many here don't understand, it depends (insert iPad Joke here) upon the app. Some apps will have little if any impact on battery life. However there are some apps that will have a significant impact on battery life. Things like running Pandora in back ground, that will impact battery life, ought to be up to the user though.

Well yeah it is in part Apple managing the user base. On the otherhand iPhone does have multitasking right now. That ability can impact battery life even now. Safari can kill the battery fairly quickly via a couple of possibilities. One is that it gets caught up in a bug that uses lots of CPU time even when not a forground app. The other issue seems to be that an auto updating web site will run in background effectively killing the battery.

So it isn't exactly a myth but it isn't the whole truth either. A background app can be perfectly well behaved or not.

Well user demand has been intense.

Well Flash is an entirely different issue and frankly Apples position is justified. Apples position with respect to multitasking is entirely different.

For the iPhone they most likely designed around use cases that didn't foresee the need for user multi tasking. However as the platform matured it became more obvious what user needs where. This can be seen in the aborted attempt to push push notifications which only solved a limited number of user issues. The noise around push notifications has died down due to the realization that it is useless with respect to the way many want to use their phone. Thus the search for a viable multitasking environment.

In a way it is all about the evolution of the product. Management at Apple has more or less admitted surprise at app store and thus the variety of software available for the platform. At least they have the wisdom to look for a viable solution.




Dave

People aren't talking about any and every app. This is not a justification for being against multitasking. This is why I suspect Apple will have a specific way to run a limited number of apps in background. You are right in a sense though that you couldn't have twenty apps running by any stretch as the supplied RAM won't allow for it. In any event I do not think you are the norm here nor do I think most people have a desire to do that. The goal is simply to be able to run X number of apps in background to do things you couldn't otherwise do. For most people X wouldn't be much greater than two.

that is your opinion but push notifications have been seen as a flop by many. Further push doesn't imply less power usage than polling. In any event concentrate on those apps that make sense for use with user multitasking. We already know about the things that don't make sense.

Dave

I'm all for multitasking and I've even theorized how it will come to iPhone OS. It's pretty much everyone whining for multitasking that have said that Android and WebOS do it right and that Apple should follow suit. I disagree and have pointed out why those failures for the consumer.


So many apps does the average use between restarting their phone? Remember, the popular argument is that it should work like Android and WebOS, not that Apple will introduce multitasking when they have user-friendly model in place that prevents every app you start from automatically running in the background.


Sure it does, it's one process designed to work for all app tied to it, It's a brilliant feature for most apps one would previously need to have run in the background. There is a reason Apple promoted this clever addition.

I can only hope that if/when Apple does intro foreground app multi-tasking that they have it as an option and leave it off by default. It really doesn't seem necessary to me; the minor annoyance of, say, having to exit Safari to do something else is minimal compared to the major potential annoyance of accidentally leaving some background app on which runs my battery down twice as fast.

Ok, then you should have stated it properly.

Too many people think that the OS doesn't multitask, which it does, and very well.

Or perhaps you should read what I wrote, rather than what you *think* I wrote.

I believe Apple will introduce some new methods, to offer users the benefits of multi-tasking, without opening the platforms to the risks of allowing background execution to all third-party applications.

My guess is that the changes in 4.0 will offer users the ability to multi-task (in popular parlance) - without necessarily offering pre-emptive time slicing of untrusted third party applications.

C.

I read what you wrote that first time, and it was very clear. You got it backwards.

Then you changed it so that you were correct.

What I said the first time was...

(and I quote...)


And I stick by that original post 100%. It think you just read it funny.

I think that in OS4.0, Apple will offer users offer users the ability to multi-task. By which I mean multi-task in common parlance. Rapid switching of activities. And some new abilities to do two things at the same time. Users will rejoice.

But I don't believe it will not be serving-up un-fettered background execution for third-party apps. Which is the standard geeky interpretation of the term "multi-task". Apple will limit this, not because the OS is incapable of timeslicing...but because third party applications are simply not trusted to play nicely with others.

So I say again...

"I am inclined to think Apple is going to offer the first kind of multi-tasking. And not so much the second."

C.

THAT was your first post. Not the one you quoted above. I don't see how I read that wrongly.

You then changed it in the later post to what you have just replied to me with. I acknowledged that you changed it to mean that - correctly.


It's pretty clear what you wrote.

heres a picture i made to show what third party app multitasking might look like on os 4.0
hope you all like it sorry it's quite rushed.

EDIT: sorry is this size any better?

1) I like the Exposé usage for multitask switching but how would you switch apps? The logistics is the real issue here. I like the 4 finger tap and/or the option of making the Home Button double-tap option access the backgrounded apps.

2) Apple doesn't use different shapes, sizes and dimensions for their iPhone icons so I'd expect any Exposé-like design to have icons that are all the same size.

3) There is no reason for such a huge image on this forum, especially one that is mostly white. Please crop it down or just link to the image.

I do like it. So...iPhone would have Expose! That would be sweet. And Spaces! I think they'd both work perfectly, just as they are, they're both concepts to deal with a finite amount of screen space.

It is.

As for any changing meaning. I'll leave that to external observers.

C.

Joe, while we appreciate the work you've done, please try to not post such large images, and cut down the white space. Thanks.

Why & what is the prob with whitespace?

*

It's just too big. It screws up the formatting so that one must scroll the page, or widen the window just for that. Without the whitespace, that wouldn't happen. It's really not needed either.

yikes, it's the forum po-lice!

I agree, the excessive white space, it would be formatted better. As it is, it is a bit much for a 24" display, and still looks a bit big on a 30" in my opinion.

It's just a matter of practicality. Don't get so upset.

App switching:

Swipe up on the home screen and the screen swipes up to show running apps. Each app has a close button in the upper right corner to quit the app from there or you can click the app to resume it.





The swipe up badge does not show up, it's only there for demonstration.

I think Dave's got the right idea. A smart implementation would be to only let apps run in the background that actually benefit the user by doing so. Specifically these are things that require no active user input while running, like internet radio. I don't think there's actually very many apps like this. Everything else seems better to be closed with a last used state, freeing the RAM up for whatever is actively being worked on. If developers considered their app to be an app that would be enhanced by the ability to run in the background they could apply to Apple for this upon app submission and let them decide. That would reduce the number right of potential concurrently running apps on any iPhone right away. Then put a user control like a task manager on the iPhone as a final way to monitor and force quit any background processes that get stuck in a loop / lock up. But in the meantime very few will get to that stage...

wtf do you get this from? Push Notifications are great. They work fine. They have a specific purpose that they serve well. Why do you need to make crap up when your argument starts to fade?

No one should be running an IM app in the background. It is wasteful, and purposeless. Better alternatives have been developed.

Honestly, I think the current Jailbroken solution Backgrounder is really the most efficient. Why? Here's why.

1. It requires user knowledge and input. The iPhone is a simple device, with poor memory management. If one does know how to manage the memory on the iPhone, your experience will suffer. Fact. My mother could never even begin to grasp that the iPod app is still open using 20 mb of memory from the song she listened to last week. But she loves her iPhone.

2. It's as needed. It doesn't come into use unless specifically called up by the user, making it a conscious decision. Backgrounding on the iPhone CANNOT be unintentionally activated, for anything more complicated than the current built in apps (which is already flawed).

3. It's subtle and doesn't require and advanced App switcher or 4 finger Expose gesture. Sure, you can have that with another Cydia app called "Activator". Some of you might think that this is fancy and necessary, but its not, at all. The solution is already there, and it's called, "The Home Button."

iDo hope Apple implements this in 4.0 just to shut people up, but I hope their R&D studies come to the same conclusions that I and many others have...there are many ways to do it, but only one that makes the most sense.

This is great news with the 4.0 update.

The feature that interests me the most, is CardDAV support. This is a major leap forward embracing open-protocols for contacts, and the iPhone is shaping up to be a major competitor for Activesync/Windows mobile devices for business ( With push contacts, calendars, mail, using OPEN protocols! )

As an email server vendor for Atmail we welcome the new iPhone update with CardDAV support. Thanks Apple!

From the presentation elements it looks like they nailed it. The only thing I was surprised about was not having aan option in Settings, like Push Notifications and Location Services, to completely turn backgrounding off and to to cherry lick the apps you wish to utilize the background services. Perhaps that is a testament to the efficiency of these services. We'll have to wait and see.

The more complex the application, the more battery it consumes. This is a full list of the new features available on the iPhone: http://www.thehdstandard.com/eyepart...iphone-os-4-0/

Catalin