Apple iPhone OS 4.0 to introduce Multitasking, 100 other features - Page 4

That is totally ridiculous.

No app on any multitasking platform like Windows or OSX, or Symbian or Android uses up resources when in the background apart from RAM.

Any modern application is purely event driven. Unless they are receiving input from something the apps are doing absolutely nothing. They will all be blocked on some event, mutex, or kernel signal. Anyone who believes this doesn't know anything about programming or pre-emptive multitasking.

So how does this make it any different than what any other phone platform offers? If I put an app in the background in Symbian or Android it isn't doing a damn thing unless it is streaming music or following the GPS and this is exactly what Apple is going to have.

What does kill a phone battery is having the wireless transceivers going. Any app (like Skype) that is constantly keeping a network connection alive is going to eat your battery like nothing else. Also streaming over 3G is an absolute battery killer. And so how is this now different than anyone else again?

yeah, but how do you get an app on the multitask dock? Either there is someway to not quit an app and keep it in dock when you run the app or the multitask dock is simply a list of every 2000 apps running. confused..

I don't know if shareware really survived except maybe as open source, but open source usually doesn't have a single developer that's trying to do the whole app all by themselves. Shareware people took donations, but I don't think a lot of them were day time developers. Nagware has been around forever though, and ads have been in iPhone apps since the app store opened. The ones that made totally free apps (no nags, ads, etc.) might have just been enthusiastic hobbyists, but it's not a sustainable model.

The use of ads is up to the developer, and I've only found ads in apps that have no up-front price, most paid apps don't have ads. If you can afford an iDevice, then complaining about having to pay for the apps on it seems a bit much.

If you don't like it, you can just delete the app and find another one. Otherwise, I think it's a bit much to complain that people aren't giving away their time and work for free. Pointing to a practice that's generally faded out doesn't really help your case in my opinion.


I don't think the 2G/3G phones can do it well. They can barely single task well, I feel like I'm limping along with my 3G. I can't wait to get the 3GT or whatever the next model will be.

You do nothing, seriously. That's how this multitasking works.

It can only be memory related since everyone else can multitask using the same ARM processors that are in the 2G and 3G. What were the original models, 128MB instead of 256MB like now?

Hard to believe it is that much of an issue, but Apple is Apple and does whatever they like.

What was the Settings screen where you enabled something (multi-tasking) for each application? I thought I saw something like that.

So as an example,

I launch the memo app. I quit the memo app pressing the home button. I go to 5 different apps in the meantime but I want to keep memos running so I can make a quick note when I need to. Now I'm in the browser and I want to quickly go to memo app so I double tap the home button..

Now I have to go through all 2000 apps in the multitask dock to find memo since there was no way to tell the iphone that I didn't want to quit it?

Actually, it seems to me like a mix of "traditional multitasking" (e.g., background audio) and some tricks (like local notifications and fast app switching) to simulate behaviors that don't really require "traditional multitasking", but can be handled in more efficient ways.

The problem is that no one here actually understands multitasking at all. They all seem to have this dream that apps in the background are stuck in some for loop all the time using 100% of CPU. Obviously no one ever looks at the task manager on their Mac or PC and notices that 99% of all processes are actually using 0% of CPU.

With the introduction of this "multitasking" in 4.0 Apple just opened up the iPhone to all the same battery sucking problems all other phones have. Keeping network connections alive, especially over 3G, is what kills your battery.

Does anyone know if there is syncing with 3rd party apps via USB? I don't know if the list AppleInsider provided is a complete list or not.

It's like OS X's application switcher that comes up when you hit command-tab. It's not a process manager so you can't manually quit apps - it's just a way to quickly jump between apps that stay open. The OS will manage which apps get to stay in memory.

It's interesting that iPad owners won't get to use this for about 4 months after iPhone users given that it's pretty much the same OS - I guess they'll have to do extra testing. The iPhone is getting iBooks too, I expected them to use that as a unique selling point for the iPad.

It is not confusing at all. There is no such thing as terminating an app when you press the Home button. When you press the Home button the app will save its state and disappear. When you open this app from the home screen it will open to its last saved state. If you are in another app and want to open the previous app then you double press the Home button, which will bring the app you last used at the button of the display.

That group of icons at the button of the display are used for fast switching between apps so you don't have to go to the home screen if you need to switch to another app you used earlier.

PS. I really doubt you will be using 2000 apps. There must be a limit on the number of apps that can be placed on that fast switching area.

Tasks-switching appears to work much the same way as it does on the Android platform, except I gather that instead of holding the home button, the iPhone OS requires the user to double-click the home button to bring up all currently running apps.

As far as there being only 4 apps displayed in the 'task managing dock', maybe that's all Apple allows, which would explain the 'we take of that for you statement' (?).

Additionally: This picture clears show that the example 'device' has a (near) 16:9 display, as neither the home button, nor any of the icons show any form of distortion, yet the display works out to approximately 16:9 when measured in Photoshop.

Yes, I did, and it worked perfectly fine thank you very much.

I'm sorry that you are so confused that you believe your 3G would grind to a halt. I'm sure the thousands with jailbroken ones might disagree though.

And when you double tap the Home button, do you stay in the current app and the "dock" pops up or something? The screen shot that is being posted looks like a "dimmed" view of the Home screen (with water droplets?), but I'm assuming you can pull up this dock within an application.

Also, is that a 3D dock similar to Mac OSX?

We should know soon, when the updated 4.0 SDK docs get digested. But I'm definitely confused for now. How will the OS "just know" which app I want to keep available for fast switching and which ones I don't?

And I fail to see (at least at this point) how the bad! bad! you blew it! task manager is different than the good! good! dock full of running apps' icons, other than one is usually vertical and this one is horizontal.

I was really hoping for a shipping date on the ipad 3g... I am waiting, but the more days that pass that they don't lay down a firm date.. the sadder I get

By traditional multitasking, I meant having multiple apps up and running at the same time. None of these new services seem to allow that. In fact, that seems to be the point. Even the music/voip/location services seem like OS functions that you can hook into through the API, allowing the OS to handle these processes. So, these apps also close and the OS picks up the work. That's what it sounded like to me anyway.

I like the concept. Having a multitude of apps actually running would chew through memory and make the UI sluggish. This sounds like a much better balance.

There won't be 2000 items in the multitask dock. They didn't explain how it works, but there would either be a limit to the number of items in the dock or apps would be removed after a certain period of time. The OS will take care of it. Again, that is the point of this system. Even if your memo app was removed from the list you should still be able to open it instantly from the home screen to exactly where you left off because the OS supports saved states.

I can't answer everything with absolute certainty since I don't have a device with the OS in hand, but the big point is that you as an end user won't have to worry about it at all.

You won't ever do anything yourself for this. The phone handles it.

If I understand correctly then the task switcher just shows the last few accessed applications.

If you don't understand anything about this and don't know any better then pressing the home button and "restarting" your app from the home screen has the same effect. The new bar is just faster if you know you were using something recently.

Effectively you could use 4.0 exactly the same way as 3.0 and never notice any difference except that some apps "restart" faster because now they were just paused, not quit. I am sure that 4.0 will only ever quit apps when memory starts getting low.

That's how I understand it too, although I would say suspend instead of close. Either way they aren't actually running in the background.

The iPhone 3g was released some 2 years ago...

No, I would guess that you jump to the multitask dock, check that memo now is no longer in the dock because the phone quit it due to low memory and then you have to press Home and then find it there again.

Windows Phone 7 isn't out yet so there is no applicable OS from MS to compare. So far, they don't even have a traditional copy/paste design for WP7, it simply forces you to move the content to the next app bypassing the clipboard altogether. Despite this limitation it's more intuitive and complete than anything Android or WebOS are shipping.



They can technically do it, but it's mostly useless and detrimential to the average end user. Even without jailbreaking your iPhone you can test this on the first 2 iPhone by running the iPod app, Safari with multiple pages and then switch between Mail and other apps. You'll see a performance hit, perhaps even Safari reloading pages when you go back in because it had to drop the RAM. At worst the iPod app with freeze for a second.



Yes, they are 128MB for the first two and 256MB for the 3GS. As it's been explain ad nauseum the first two have little extra RAM leftove when you check the stats. The 3GS has about 64MB left, on average when running basic processes without running 3rd-party background apps.

Other phones did backgrounding years ago with less RAM, but they also were using much lighter, simpler mobile OSes, not a stripped down desktop OS. Apple did amazing things with Mac OS X to make it iPhone OS, but it's still a hog compared to older mobile OSes.

Not only do you pull out some random video of a device I don't own, you go about calling me a retard for it? Amazing. Hi there [!]

That's far too technical mumbo jumbo to share with people at an event like this. Just trust that only Apple knows how to do this while everyone else has done it horribly.

OH NO! iBill WON'T SEE MY COMMENTS ANYMORE? ROOOOOOOFL

Yes! Thank you. Finally someone with some sense. What I find drains the battery the most in terms of apps running in the background is anytime the radio is used. It's NOT THE CPU. Even when an app is using more than 5% cpu, it has no noticeable impact on my battery life.

When me and solipsism talked about this a little while back, I ran a bunch of apps. 10 I believe. One of the apps was msn messenger, and since I hadn't signed on in a while I kept getting IMs all day long. This thing obviously used the radio and is what I point to for whatever increase in battery drain I saw.

I was able to place more than 4 icons in the simulator.


Check this icon (and every other large enough icon) from the site you posted previously. If you are using a Mac use grab tool to measure the dimensions of the icon. On my MBP I am getting 160pxl wide by 170pxl in height (they should be square). As I stated before this is normal when you build your presentation using wide screen and use a standard projection. I know because I do a lot of presentations. If that don't convince you then I don't know what will.

I bet you are correct. Although having every app's state saved would tend to chew up a lot of storage if you have a lot of apps.

Well, then having a single process owned by the OS keeping these connections open would be a logical benefit. That plus not having tonnes of apps running means not chewing up all you memory, which you know, sort of makes performance sucky for everyone.

To claim having multiple apps running will never result in more CPU usage in just silly. On your desktop, opening a page with flash in your browser, load up a couple movies in Quicktime and rip a DVD in the background while you work on your word processor. Those background apps will keep on using the CPU. Sure you could find examples that would just idle in the background, but it is just as easy to find examples that wouldn't.

I'm pretty sure the phone has no idea which ones you want to keep for switching. It will just keep as many in memory as it can and start dropping them in some particular order (oldest?!). So if you really wanted to keep memo in memory and you launched 12 apps and 2 games after that, then well tough, it will be long gone.

Oy vey! The main limitation is with RAM usage, not with active CPU cycles. Why try to twist the issue? There is no virtual memory on the NAND for obvious reasons so everything you want to run has to be loaded in RAM.

That's too bad. I like the idea of always having a recorder app available quickly when I need to record notes. even if I access it after 10 different app launches. What apple is doing is putting the control of which app you want quick access to in the hands of the iphone instead of the user. I can't rely on the recorder app always be there for quick access. I like the way webos handles multitasking - I'm having doubts about the iphone way..

I have a Nokia E71. The battery lasts for a couple of days no matter if the calendar, notes, web, etc are open and all running in the background. I start Skype and the battery is dead in 4 hours.

Welcome to my world.

I think that's because it's not so much the same OS, but a related OS that shares a lot of code with other iPhone OSs.

Anyone know if this double press Home button for dock, will be added as an option to the current Settings > General > Home settings or will it replace it altogether? Did they mention that?

Your effort is sincerely appreciated, but the discrepancy that you noted is simply not enough to account for the dramatic difference between the the display device featured on the slides, and the iPod 3GS sitting right in front of.

We'll See Soon Enough... until then let's just agree to disagree

I'm pretty sure this is up to the developer of the memo app.

The way I read it, the system provides for services that apps can run in the background now, but which developers still have to code into their apps (they don't currently have it.) The only services they can use are the seven provided, but one of these is "fast app switching" where the save state of app has been considerably improved.

Therefore, if your memo app has been recoded to take advantage of iPhone OS 4.0, it will likely just save it's state, but by means of the new feature, leave the user in the exact same place, right down to the cursor position. Unless the app is busy reading or writing a file when you switch away, it won't really have a use for any of the other six backgrounding services.

IMO it probably won't appear in the list of running apps you get on a double-tap of the home button, so finding the app and re-launching it (albeit probably faster and restored to the exact same state), would be the way you switch back to the app.

It might be however, that simply by using that "fast app switching" multi-tasking feature, the app obtains a position in the dock of icons of currently running apps. However, if all programs that use "fast app switching" end up in that list, it kind of implies that every app will eventually end up in that list.

This kind of describes a system where all app management would be directly handled by the OS. Apps would be forced to quit only when resources got too compromised. Apple has already said that the user can't actively quit running apps unless the app itself provides it.

For that reason, I think that apps that only use the fast app switching aspect of the new multi-tasking, will still basically be quitting and re-starting, and not running in the background at all. Even if it's in an "enhanced" hard-to-tell-the-difference kind of way.

They really didn't go into that much detail from what I've read.

Just curious, but do you think that Apple just totally screwed up and accidentally used a graphic of their soon-to-be-announced widescreen iPhone, or do you think they did it on purpose to see if anyone would notice?

Yeah, I'm hoping they post the announcement in iTunes or something quick so I can watch it for myself.

TextEdit is probably pretty idle in the background.