Apple's iPhone 4.0 to support multitasking via Expose-like interface - Page 3

It gives me a warm feeling inside that you are happy for me.

While this is still just a a rumor I will remain hopeful. The rumor doesn't tip the scale for me multi-tasking does.

For some Flash is the big issue, I could care less about Flash, I only point out that Flash 10.1 could resolve some issues for Apple if Apple and Adobe decide to work on hardware acceleration.

Front facing webcam could care less about that.

The only "want" I have had that the iPad currently lacks is multi-tasking. Once that is resolve I will most likely get a 3G version for both my wife and myself and a WiFi for my daughter.

I would like to see what the HP Slate has to offer but that device has sadly become one big mystery for some reason. Also while this may make you fall off your chair I am actually not all that interested in a Tablet that runs Windows 7.

I'm not so sure of those dates. Apple has historically released the next iPhone OS Betas and SDK in mid-March with the release date on the new HW right around the next HW release of late-June/early-July.

We'll need, by my calculations, at least 2.5 months of Beta testing the next OS. Sure, they could work it like the iPad and sell it with an older version of the OS at first, but I am not sure that would well for the iPhone.

I expect the next Special Event to be held in April.

Really? Has it been explained in detail???

Now all of a sudden multi-tasking is cool, isn't it guys?

It's so funny how these things (like copy and paste) are looked at with great disdain up until Apple actually implements it.

From here on out: Stop making excuses for why Apple has left something out. Start thinking for yourself. Artificial limitations require no excuse other than the fact that development hasn't reached that point yet.

The next time someone bitches about the ipad or iphone missing something, don't try to come up with some bogus excuse for why it's not there. You're not fooling anyone.

People get consfused with OSX because clicking "x" does not close the program (most of the time). That would not be the case in iPhone OS. Safari has already shown how the Expose portion would work (although it sounds like we will be dealing with icons not images of the app). You would simply activate expose and an "x" would appear in the top left corner of each icon. Click the "x" and the program is closed.

The only source of confusion would be what happens to an app when you hit the home button? Does it close or remain open? This could be mitigated in many ways. There could be a first run dialog box asking what you want the app to do when you hit the home button with instructions to access the setting if you want to change the default behavior at a later date. You could get a popup when you hit the home button to exit the app that says the app is still running in the background, or a box asking the user if they wanted to close the app or run it in the background, possibly with the option to set a default behavior. Or Apple could introduce two distinct ways to "close" an app. One would close it, the other would set it to run in the background. I don't think the hurdles are as great as you seem to think they are. Apple could definitely come up with an intuitive system.

Yeah, like a file system.

Sorry, maybe I'm not paying close enough attention, but where did they get this information?

This could be taken care of with a different gesture to close the app. For instance, dragging two fingers from one corner to another might put it in the background.

Although if they did that, people might not like it since they're just so used to hitting the home button.

We'll see what the geniuses at Apple come up with. I have a feeling it'll be a setting in the preferences that determines how the home button acts.

There are a lot of misleading things in this article. Of course, none of you seem to have noticed them, all they do is feed fuel to your fire.


FALSE. Android absolutely does NOT require you to "manually manage system resources". Sure, you have the option to do that if you're an insane OCD'er, but Android is smart enough to kill off background resources as it deems necessary. I have never once had to manually quit an application, it's all done automatically.


Hmm... that sounds familiar. Where have I seen this before in a mobile platform? Ah yes, that's right... Android.

The key combo is different (hold down home instead of tapping it twice) but this is the exact same interface that Android uses to quickly switch between running apps.

Comparing it to Expose is to presume that it's some kind of amazing Apple invention. It's nothing like Expose, which is in fact a very cool method for managing apps on your desktop computer. But showing you a group of icons that represent your running applications? That's not Expose. Apple is borrowing this interface directly from Android.

Look, Android has clearly borrowed a lot from iPhone OS - but Apple fan boys can never admit to when Apple borrows from other people. This is one of those cases. You have to admit it or you are simply lying to yourself.


Again, another feature borrowed from Android.


Nice spin. First off, to install non-market apps, you have to go find a deeply-buried system preference to enable this feature. And it explicitly warns you to the dangers of enabling that feature.

Second, sure this could be exploited - but what it's really about is allowing people to develop any software they want for the platform without having to rely on Google's approval to be put in the market place.

You've all read the horror stories of iPhone developers being shunned by Apple and having no recourse, right? With Android, that's no big deal. You don't have to put your app in the official market at all. You can put it on your web site and anyone in the world can download and install it. That's powerful.

Ya know, just like you do with your desktop computer. You're presumably smart enough not to download and install software from sources you don't trust. Imagine if on your iMac or Macbook Pro, you could only download and install apps that Apple itself has "approved" - pretty ridiculous right? Well that's what Apple does with the iPhone, and I don't see how anyone could possibly deem that acceptable.

Android is an open platform, that's one of its big strengths. You can install anything you want on it. Can't say the same thing for the iPhone because you can only install stuff from the App store that Apple has approved. But somehow Apple fans see this as a good thing? Right....


This is true. I'll give you guys that one. Apple's global push system is pretty slick and well done. But the actual notification system itself (modal popup boxes that block the rest of the OS until you acknowledge the notification box) are vastly inferior to Android's notification system, which simply puts incoming notificatons in the menu bar for you to react to when you feel like it. Much better as they stay out of your way and you can deal with them when you feel like it. It's also nice because you can use it as a reminder to respond to something later, since it will stay there until you dismiss it.

These were never looked at with disdain, only the people caliming that Apple is teh doomed and all the other nonsense reasons why Apple is evil because they choose to get it right over poor implementations like copy/paste in Android, Cycorder for jailbroken iPhones, and unencumbered multitasking on early iPhones. Those are all still poor for various reasons. It was never an all or nothing argument with any of these features and they were ALL expected to come eventually.

I think the problem is that there's no reason Yelp needs to actually keep running. It does need to maintain its state, but that seems like a programming issue, not a need for pre-emptive multitasking.
I don't know if all apps are able to save state, but I know that many do.

Ahh.... that is good to know. So an Android developer gets some built-in assistance for the memory management, but it comes at a price.

Does Android allow manual deallocation of memory?

*

What bogus excuses??

The excuses for not having copy/paste since the beginning were valid. The same goes for the reasons for still not having "real" multitasking. And those excuses were just what you said: development hadn't reached that point yet for the quality implementation that customers expect. Simply put, it's not easy, and it'll only be there once it's great.

I said dark places, not THOSE places...

Here's another vote. Android's multitasking works great. I don't know where these other 200 votes are you speak of, but my guess is they're all from iPhone users who have never touched an Android device.

How are they inaccurate comparisons? I'm not arguing anything specs-wise, I'm arguing on an ideological stand point. The maker of the device that *I* own shouldn't arbitrarily tell me what I can and cannot do with it.

What's a valid argument for a closed eco-system app system (besides improved profits)? That's what I was arguing against and calling a sheep, NOT "anyone else with a valid viewpoint."


I love OSX as much as the next person, but I have 4GB RAM and can barely leave Safari open when using Logic 9 with a decent amount of tracks and software instruments. I'm not complaining about it, because I understand Logic is very resource-intensive, but it's worth stating.

Also, Mac laptops are much more prevalent than desktops these days (sales numbers can back that up). So battery management is very much a concern in the OSX environment.


I think there's a large difference between in-theory and real life. Is it "good" to leave an unused app sitting in memory for a long time? Not really, but the difference really is negligible in everyday use. In my experience, Android will have killed off the app by the next time I check the task manager (once every few hours).

Also, you forget to mention the battery drain associated with launching and relaunching the same apps over and over again. This is a much bigger drain then letting the app sit in memory, and a large reason why uneducated task-killing Android users experience worse battery life.


Please see above. I addressing a specific contingent of users who support a closed eco-system for apps, not anyone who argues against the other things I mentioned. My specific statement: "Anyone who advocates for a closed-ecosystem app store is either an Apple shareholder/sheep or an idiot."

Way to generalize there, buddy.

I would imagine an App could have several files open at the same time as well. For example in text editing one might want to copy and paste several different phrases from one document to another. Rather than copying everything and then deleting what you don't need, it would be much simpler to have both documents open at once.

Point is, once multi-tasking is available in the OS, Apps might want to implement an internal scheme to manage multiple instances of itself like Safari. The OS wide multi manager feature might also be able to display multi level icons for an individual App.

Maybe it's in the works lol


^could be complete bs though :/


I've had a lot of people that pull excuse after excuse as to why something like copy and paste or MMS wasn't implemented. Statements like "it's not needed" tend to lead me to believe that people accepted it wasn't there and would never be there.

The fact is, the iphone OS has only been out a few years. The things people shrug off and try to say will never happen might very well happen. I'm sure OSX wasn't as great as it is right out of the gate.

It's just funny to listen to people sort of come up with reasons as to why the phone is the best thing ever, and whatever it's lacking was nonsense anyways.

uh, yeah really?

Considering Nokia's N900 had a full Expose style interface for task switching already last year... and it is fully animated, hardware accelerated with live minature images of each running app including playing videos.

That might have been your excuse, but even on youtube I heard a lot of the same thing, which was people trying to make excuses for a scenario where the device would never have the feature.

No, we just look down upon knee-jerk, badly designed, hack implementations, rushed in to fulfill geek wet dreams and feature check-lists.

I'm glad Apple waited until they had a proper copy/paste solution, and I frankly don't care about 'multi-tasking'. Fast application switching? Sure. But my life hasn't suffered one bit for having to click one extra time occasionally.

We just don't think its worth frothing at the mouth the way 'some' do. (hint).

Crikey! I'll see your extra pedantic and raise you a nit-pick. From the 'Acute Accent' page at Wiki (my added emphasis):


From Dictionary.com

The English language eh? What a palaver!

Seriously, you are on an Apple fan site and you want Apple fans to be as cynical and myopic as you are. SO a quick check back doesn't show any disdain only patience while Apple sorts out how its going to be implemented (for the most part). From here on out, try more "man" and less "straw" in your commentary. Making observations on what the possible reason for Apple doing, or not doing something, or whether or not that particular thing is desireable is not making excuses. And asking everyone else to agree with you and labelling it as "thinking for yourself" is as egomaniacal as it comes sunshine.

Wrong on both counts. Once you cross the line of a recognized law or term of service you don't get to complain anymore because you willingly crossed into territory that explicitly isn't supported.

You can complain that the law itself is wrong or that the terms of service should be different, that remains valid.

But going to the next level is off into hypothetical land and the logic gets all tied up with as much validity as a proof that uses a surreptitious divide-by-zero to get to the end.

Yeah, except everything he said was true - Android does multitasking very well (my battery life is no worse than it was when I had an iPhone), and allowing you to install "non-approved" apps is a good thing, not a bad thing as the original article suggests. The article's spin on non-approved apps was that you're opening yourself up to being hacked. The exact same thing applies to the desktop - you'd crap bricks if the only things you could install on your desktop OS X machine were Apple-approved.

Sigh.

Reading the article suggests that this is exactly the use case the Apple is addressing. But this doesn't require multitasking, it only requires task switching. An expose type interface would solve the task switching problem and further limit the need for "true" multitasking.

Traditional preemptive multitasking is a kludge. It was designed to make the programmer's life easier, not because it was actually the best, or even a good, way to run tasks simultaneously. It requires enormous complexity at the OS level to do it right but it allows the programmer to just ignore the whole foreground / background issue and assume that their program is the only thing running.

Apple is generally not very supportive of making the programmer's life easier if it makes the user's life harder. I suspect that they are not ever going to allow multitasking in the way the Mac OS or Android does.

People mean different things when they say "multitasking". Mostly they mean one of three things:

event handing - skype calls arriving, new mail, facebook updates. This is what push notification is for.

task switching - go from yelp to map to safari to monopoly to back to yelp. This sounds like what the expose interface would be for. Apps get suspend events and then are just frozen until they are switched back. Then they get a resume event. They don't run in the background at all, they just pick up where they left off.

background tasks - the only area where true multitasking is important. Pandora playing music, GPS tracking, downloading. I think Apple will only allow this for specific services through a background management API. They'll start with a very few use cases where an app can register to play music, or maintain a network connection, or similar and add more services as people come up with new things that really require background operation.

The article talks about multitasking but there isn't really enough information to tell if it is more than just task switching, which is what I think it is. That would still provide a huge percentage of the benefits people actually want from multitasking, and with zero battery impact.

And Apple defenders are never ashamed of throwing egg on themselves and backtracking.

Apple will not make a video iPod. Nobody wants to watch video on an iPod.

Apple should not allow third parties to create native iPhone applications. Nobody wants native iPhone applications. Web apps are really SWEET.

Apple will not make a 3G iPhone. Nobody cares about 3G.

Apple will not add GPS to the iPhone. Nobody cares about GPS.

Apple will not add copy and paste to the iPhone. Nobody cares about copy and paste.

Apple will never switch to Intel processors.

And these same people probably like to make fun of Bill Gates' famous "Nobody needs more than 640K of RAM" statement.

Of course we don't get a good idea here as these are rumors. Really this could even be planted information.

As to multitasking you really don't have a clue do you. Multitasking by definition means you have the system managing multiple processes for the user. Without the apps executing in background you would not actually benefit from multitasking. The path you advocate would be a big fail.

As to apps burning up the battery while running in background that is the users responsibility. But here is the important thing, there is a lot of development going on for iPad, the low power apps will win out when they can. Often though the execution of a background app is so important that burnning up the battery won't matter. It is all about making the unit meet the needs of the user.

By the way you probably fail to realize that one won't be required to multi task apps. The reality is multitasking has zero impact on people that don't have a strong need for it.

Sounds like you want execution suspended. That is not a bad thing in this case. I would imagine Apple would provide developers with a way to suspend apps if they are in background. However this can't be the default behaviour as many apps need their CPU time in background.

You have never had Safari or Mail crash on you requiring a restart? The sad reality is that programming is an art not a hard science there will never be a bug free OS. Besides that once iPhone supports multiple processors and OpenCL there will be hundreds of threads flying about. In case you are wondering, yes I expect to eventually see GCD and OpenCL on iPhone OS, such technologies are the best way to up performance while managing power usage.

That would be fairly stupid of them as it would set them up with a short term OS. Like it or not the Cortex Line will move to even smaller and lower power processes. This means more room for cores (both CPU & GPU), on board caches & buffers and a host of other things. So imagining what is in A4 double or quadruple that capacity in two years or so. In other words let's say that A4 has four cores, in two to three years you could have an iPad with sixteen cores ( given that a new Cortex line comes out with the SMP support). It is not an issue of die space as the Cortex cores are extremely small now.

So why would Apple put fetters as you call it on the OS when they have an even better idea of where tech is going than I do? Computation in an ALU is extremely cheap these days with respect to power usage, it is real world I/O that kills battery life. Note that a single Cortex A9 core can run on as little as 250mW of power today, it's possible that what Apple implemented is even less. So by the time you are done with your SoC you may only be seeing two or three watts being used to run the entire SoC flat out. Apple has to build up iPhone OS for the long haul, that includes a workd with lots of computational resources. Because there is one certainy in the future, that is more cores and or lower power.

This doesn't even get into what is needed to develop modern responsive apps these days. It is just not wise to take away the features that developers need to make your hardware shine. Rather you want to give developers capability not seen on other platforms.


Dave

Couldn't the app developers just do that themselves? I guess an Apple provided solution would be more consistent.

Where do you get the no virtual memory thing from? You obviously have ZERO clue on this fact. It's OS X! Of course it has virtual memory, it's predominant difference is it has a different GUI structure.

From iPhone dev docs [Memory Usage Performance Guidelines] :

So how much of the rest is bunk too? I'm not even going to delve into that.

It works great for moderate to advanced users, but I don't think it works well for either Apple's business goals or their consumers. I think it needs to be more intelligent before Apple includes it. These things take more time to get right but they often have a pay off in the end.



let me set my record straight.

• I never cared about MMS but knew it would come. I believe it and SMS are a ripoff from an oligopoly that should be looked into.
• I believe that multitasking will come with v4.0 but it won't be the user-unfriendly setup in other mobile OSes, but something well managed.
• I believe that the biggest drawback to the iPhone right now in terms of usability & user-friendliness is the Notifcation System (not to be confused with the brilliant Push Notificaiton Service). WebOS and Android both did a brilliant job of this.
• I believe that Apple and the users would be best be served by folders and smart folder on the homescreens as well as a bunch of other things I don't think will be in v4.0.
• I believe the moon doesn't exist.
• I believe that vampires are the best golfers but they never get a chance to prove it.
• I believe there are 31 letters in the white alphabet.

What was the question again?

(was watching 30 Rock, those last three from one of Tracy Morgan's rants)

Huh. So name calling is cool as long as we pretend we're not talking to anyone in particular.

Good to know, I guess.

Funny, Nokia had that same interface in S60/Symbian in 2002. Who is copying who?

More generally, people who use the "All Apple users claimed x, but now all Apple users say y, ha ha Apple users are hypocrites" are moronic douchebags. Say, this is fun.

.....

What he said!

You have to use the indefinite article.

This reminds me of the dildo scene from Fight Club...

Narrator:: Was it ticking?
Airport Security Officer: Actually throwers don't worry about ticking 'cause modern bombs don't tick.
Narrator:: Sorry, throwers?
Airport Security Officer: Baggage handlers. But, when a suitcase vibrates, then the throwers gotta call the police.
Narrator:: My suitcase was vibrating?
Airport Security Officer: Nine times out of ten it's an electric razor, but every once in a while...
[whispering]
Airport Security Officer: It's a dildo. Of course it's company policy never to, imply ownership in the event of a dildo... always use the indefinite article a dildo, never your dildo.
Narrator:: I don't own...
[Officer waves Narrator off]

People who make fun of people who make lists are.....

Oh, never mind.

It's also a sign that the Yelp app needs work on remembering it's previous state so that it doesn't have to "restart". If this remember-and-start-from-previous-state were implemented in more apps it would be pretty indistinguishable from multi-tasking. Some speed of launch situations will favor true multi-tasking but I would hazard the guess the majority can work well with remember-and-start-from-previous-state.