Apple iPhone OS 4.0 to introduce Multitasking, 100 other features - Page 7

Amen!

AFAIK, the lack of a 3G chip is the issue.

This is great if you are going on vacation or just abroad, I thought this option already existed.

From the videos that have been posted it looks otherwise. Looks like they all go into the multitasking bar, and you have to quit them manually by tap-holding on the icons and then an option to kill them shows up.

The weird thing is that this works with apps that are not written for multitasking yet.

Just an observation: if it works like you describe, how would you start multitasking? By this I mean that double-tapping shows up the bar with running apps, but not the home screen, so it would be rather difficult to launch a new app and expand the pool of apps that are multitasking.

Yes it does but only for data roaming, not in general.

Settings->General->Network->Data Roaming On/Off

RAM. If I run a ton of apps in the background I see my ram usage get up to around 90% on my phone. In a desktop OS, you don't want to run at 90% usage because you'd constantly be using your pagefile. Accessing a HDD is a lot slower than accessing ram (in fact someone explained to me one time that what takes 10 seconds in ram can translate to a year on the hdd or something absurd? I'll have to look it up) so if you needed extra space, your computer would be come slower.

The point here is about battery life and performance. Performance on my phone is a bit different than on a desktop because of the hardware differences. Unless I need to open up more apps which require more ram than available (and forces me to close some opened) I don't see any major difference in performance (depending on what the app in the background is doing.)

If I look at my task manager, there are plenty of processes running that take up a little ram, but use 0% cpu.


BTW, your comment reminded me of this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs They took 24 SSD's, ran them in RAID, then as a test they run everything in the start menu. Pretty damn cool if you ask me

That multitasking bar we saw when he presses the Home Button twice is, at least so far, a list of all apps you've recently opened. It's not discerning between apps with or without the multitasking APIs in use.

It appears that multitasking is all on the devs. They have to apply the APIs and rehire is no Settings option to toggle the global service on/off or choose from a list of apps with the backgrounding option.

I don't own an Android phone, and I don't know which apps they are running to use up the cpu cycles so I can't comment on that, but while what you say is true, on my phone it's not the cpu usage that drains the battery but the radio usage. Cpu usage does in fact increase energy usage, but it does not have the kind of impact Jobs will have you believe.

If I load up coreplayer and open a video, I can pause it and put it in the background. From then on out, it uses 0% cpu usage and battery is unaffected. If I want to go back to my video, I can simply switch to it. (There are ways to tell the app to remember where I left off and load the previous playlist, so even running it in the bg isn't needed, but it's possible.)

Running a program like slacker radio, however, will definitely have an impact. It uses a constant internet stream which makes use of the radio. It's this kind of background process I see an impact from, and the iphone will not be immune. If you run Pandora in the background, expect an impact.

Work related apps in my mind are the ones that benefit the most. Things like MS Word, email, excel, or even powerpoint. None of them require anything when sitting in the background, so I can switch back and forth between these apps to build a quick document on the go.

Finally, I can run my SNES emulator in the background so if I get a call while playing super mario brothers, I can chat it up, then get right back into my game when I'm done. Or heck, if I want to google how to beat one of the levels, I can load up Opera Mobile and switch back and forth between my game and the cheat guide. I would see the same hit on battery life if I closed out of each app to get to the other. IN FACT, technically it might use slightly more energy to constantly load each app to switch back and forth.

That would be incorrect. All MMS needs is SMS + a data connection. Easily done with 2G.

Regs, Jarkko

Uh, OGG is an audio format.

When you are multitasking - how do you close an app?

I have iphone 3g. I was very tempted to upgrade to 3GS, not anymore. . . Rather just wait for 4th gen and have new firmware and hardware additions - front facing camera? nice!

C-

You lot just don't get it. CPU is a small fraction of the power usage of a mobile device. The biggest drain is powering the radios. The reason Android users are complaining about battery drain is because they are all running Twitter apps in the background that are keeping the 3G radio going all the time.

Have you ever noticed your iPhone gets warm when you use it as a phone?!

Streaming is just as bad. Keeping the radio going all the time is going to eat your battery alive. A much better idea would be that the app buffers a reasonably large amount of data and then lets the radio go idle for a while before starting again.

You mean you don't do that? What is the point of having all that RAM if you aren't going to use it.

Everyone I have ever seen who uses a mac rarely, if ever, closes an application. Most of them don't even understand that you need to quit an app, not just close all the windows. So they effectively end up running every app they have at the same time.

On my Windows 7 PC I have 8 individual apps running and there are 79 processes running with CPU usage of 4%. And that includes having Bittorrent going in the background. So don't tell me that multitasking doesn't work.

Obviously you have never looked at activity monitor on your Mac.

And just for comparison you can get a Bittorrent client for the Nokia N900. It runs perfectly in the background even if it does use the battery quite much.

I hate to tell you this, but every other phone can do MMS with only a GSM chipset . You don't need 3G. It was just an arbitrary decision by Apple that they didn't support MMS in the 2G.

Uh No.

Ogg includes video as well. Ogg Vorbis is a audio format that uses the Ogg container.

Simple mistake I suppose.

Ogg is a container, that can be used for audio or video. Vorbis, FLAC and Theora are the common lossy audio, lossless audio, and lossy video codecs used with Ogg, respectively.



I'm not sure how Pandora does it but I've gotten great results with their streaming app running constantly for hours on a battery. Obviously it was in the foreground, but the display was locked (read: off).

You don't close an app unless for some bizarre reason the app itself gives you that opportunity. The phone takes care of everything and will kill a background app when it wants the RAM back. So you have no control over the multitasking and shouldn't need to.

The only people using Macs that think closing a window will close the app are usually people that have switched from the Windows world, where closing a window will close the process (since generally each window is a separate process). Once they have used a Mac for enough time, they realize the difference.Not that it really makes much of one.

As for multitasking, iPhone OS and Mac OS X handle it just fine...UNIX tends to hold it's own fairly well in that regard. The point is, Apple decided the user experience on their mobile devices would be degraded if many user space apps were running at the same time. Even with this artificial limitation in place, iPhone OS is still a fully pre-emptive multitasking OS, with many processes running in addition to the user apps (just like your Win7 box has 79 processes with only 8 apps running). Apple judged, within their experience, that there were negative consequences to allowing multiple apps to run on the iPhone OS devices. From that judgement, they invested a non-trivial amount resources into designing this pseudo-multitasking framework, in order to compensate for preventing multiple running apps. Do you honestly think they did so simply to handicap users? Apple can make dick moves as much as anyone else, but generally there is a benefit, even only for them. Do you think the decided 'hey, let's piss some people off with the OS that will run the future of our company, for no reason whatsoever! Yes!"?

Perhaps, as you suggest, the new API's will include automatic buffering or other power-saving techniques that devs will automatically get by using the services...the location services is an obvious example of this were apps that do not require GPS accuracy will fall back to cell tower triangulation when using the new API for background location updates, strictly to prevent the addition draw of the GPS.

I will complain about Apple when they make unfair, dumb or anticompetitive decisions. But, in this case, at least present on argument....otherwise you come off sounding like the kid on the playground who tries to tease other kids to hide the fact his parents are on welfare...i.e. you sound like you are lashing out to compensate for inadequacies.

Incorrect. They will 3 years old. Math FTW.

Any platform has to deal with older phones not having hardware features which are featured in newer versions of the operating systems. Newer programs might break older phones. This is a fact of life.

I am merely using the AppleInsider definition of fragmentation. The AI definition applies to all hardware platforms.


EDIT: The iPhone 3g and 2g will NOT support the crippled multitasking feature, while only the 3gs and newer iPhones will. The AI definition of fragmentation is alive and well with that condition.

Well, from what I read a while ago, the thing with MMS is that there are a lot of custom implementations on how to do it. On the other hand the only thing being something like a standard and clean implementation is with using 3G.

I cannot give you any sources from the top of my head, I would have to dig that up again.

So instead of having to different implementations for MMS on first and second version of the iPhone , it looks like they chose one implementation and no support for the first generation. I guess there is some business strategy in that decision (i.e. selling more units)

You can actually close an app. If you open up the multitasking dock and touch an app icon for a while, it gets wobbly and a little symbol appears in the upper corner. Touch it again, and the app closes. Had to do this with Safari when it got stuck in landscape mode.

I don't agree as MMS was definitely designed to work in GPRS networks even before EDGE was deployed.

2G and 3G could act differently if MMS was sent via the signalling channels, but MMS was designed to be usable in multiple networks, thus they chose a simple and existing signalling channel that is the same in both access types - SMS. There is no difference in SMS when sent via 2G and 3G as far as the content of the message is concerned (which is the part MMS is interested in).

MMS encoding when it's retrieved from the MMSC (MMS Centre) over WAP may vary as the data may be adapted to fit the terminals capabilities (resolution etc.), but that has nothing to do with the technology via which the MMSC is reached (2G, 3G data, Wifi, carrier pigeons). MMS is relatively similar to E-mail. It's just a bunch of XML files in SMIL-format with data. Actually some operators allow you to convert your MMS messages to be sent as E-mail to you.

If you want to find an "Applefied" reason for MMS not being in iPhone 2G, one could eplain that since EDGE data rates are relatively low, sending large images and video may be bad for the user experience over the slow channel. If we repeat this reason (that I just came up with) often enough on this forum, it will become fact. Just wait and see.

Regs, Jarkko

P.S. Here's a link to a separate MMS-handler server product, which has some raw data snippets to give you more detail: http://www.ozekisms.com/load-balanci...age_number=495

Lets hope that some of the 'OTHER 100 FEATURES' are good enough to put the ANDROID & NEXUS ONE to SHAME!! or at least to be considered VALUABLE!

WWDC has been all about the iPhone OS and App development the last 2 years. With the iPhone OS 4.0, SDK, and iPad already out the door, there is only 1 thing left to focus on: Mac OS X. I'm betting there will be a preview of 10.7 which will include the following:

1.) Full resolution indepedence
2.) BluRay support
3.) New Filesystem (similar to iPhone OS (just a catalog, most apps store the data as opposed to the whole fs, and the fs searches through the app) but with ZFS like features such as cloning, pooling, etc.)
4.) WebKit2 Safari
5.) New UI (like iPad)
6.) Ability to use some or all iPhone, iPad apps natively

Obviously, this would mean new developer tools and SDK for developers. I hope there is more opensource development as well, like with the Filesystem.

Digital downloads/streaming is more profitable and considerably more prolific than Blu-ray, so I think the inclusion of Blu-ray looks even more grim with each passing year (until well after Apple feels threatened by it).

A new filesystem and RI would be nice. I doubt we'll see a UI designed for a 10" touchscreen as the Mac U and WebKit2 can come with a Safari update, it's usually released independently of Mac OS X.

Gruber was stating that Mac OS X Preview may be delayed until 2011 because of the work with the iPad and iPhone v4.0 OS. I hope not, but Apple does have a track record here.

Sounds like the trailer for some Hollywood action-blockbuster...

"This summer...(wooosh!) ...from the people who brought you iPhone...(wooosh!)...iPod touch...(wooosh!!)...and iPad..."

Hello