White iPhone video may show scrapped Exposé interface for iOS multitasking - Page 3

Because having thousands of potential apps across your device can be tough for some to remember their location just as you are having trouble understanding what FAS was designed for.


It doesnt matter where you access the app, itll pull from that suspend state regardless. You DONT have to double-tap the Home Button to suspend an app or keep it running in the background. You CAN use Spotlight or the Home Screen to access an app that is still running in the background using one of the various APIs that allow it or from a suspend state.


Youve been saying multiple things. You started off complaining that its apps running in the background you have to manually remove. Then you moved on saying you dont like it, which is perfectly fine. I dont care for it so I rarely use it. You then stated that a list of recent items should clear itself out (which makes no damn sense). And now your back to complaining that its not useful for anyone to have a list of your most recently accessed apps.


Im trying to think youre trolling but Im having a hard time thinking you can not understand what FAS does at this point.

If you dont need a quick list of your most recent apps then dont use FAS. Its that simple.

Its not a multitasking bar. Any more than the list of "Recent Items" on Mac or the "Programs" list in Windows is a multitasking bar.


In iOS each app is sandboxed in its own process. An app may have crashing problems, but one app cannot make another app crash.


What mess are you talking about?

... and you totally missed my point.

The point I'm trying to make is that we are arguing about mostly nothing at all. Otherwise intelligent people who normally make good contributions to the discussion are using up this whole thread arguing about the details of various multi-tasking setups and it all basically means nothing. It's irrelevant, and it's a waste of time to argue about such details unless there is a material difference to the end user. There isn't.

The difference between "a list of apps you recently used" (some of which are still "sort of" running and some of which are suspended but can start again instantly and some of which are actually closed and not running), and "a list of running programs to switch to," is almost moot. It certainly doesn't matter to anyone but a programmer. That's pretty much the whole point of the UI Apple uses for the purpose.

The best example of how stupid this argument is, is this thread which is supposed to be about an alternative UI for multi-tasking but is now completely used up by dorks arguing about what "real" multi-tasking is when the truth is no one really cares and it doesn't matter to the end user at all.

It's like the kind of discussion you'd find in an Android forum.

Yeah, its suspended, but do you really think that all x-many apps in FAS are still hold up in RAM? You shouldnt.


Personally, I think the list of recent apps should be a list from the Spotlight screen when you swipe the 1st Home Screen to the right. If I then tap in the Spotlight window at the top the keyboard will then appear.

Id also like for Apple to use a badge for for apps that are currently active in the system, even if just in FAS so users know which apps could be causing an issue. But if you think about that youll see why they arent likely to do that. Anything that makes it less seamless is not for Apple, yet this is a common misconception people have though I oddly only see it with people are more technically inclined. I guess others dont even think about what or how multitasking works.

And is partly why iOS has a long battery life and Android devices have a short battery life. Apple is very careful not to let fancy crap just drain the battery. What good is a device if you constantly have to charge it?

From Apple Docs: I have bolded certain phrases that I feel support my previous remarks.

Multitasking
Applications built using iOS SDK 4.0 or later (and running in iOS 4.0 and later) are not terminated when the user presses the Home button; instead, they shift to a background execution context. The multitasking support defined by UIKit helps your application transition to and from the background state smoothly.

To preserve battery life, most applications are suspended by the system shortly after entering the background. A suspended application remains in memory but does not execute any code. This behavior allows an application to resume quickly when it is relaunched without consuming battery power in the meantime. However, applications may be allowed to continue running in the background for the following reasons:

An application can request a finite amount of time to complete some important task.
An application can declare itself as supporting specific services that require regular background execution time.
An application can use local notifications to generate user alerts at designated times, whether or not the application is running.
Regardless of whether your application is suspended or continues running in the background, supporting multitasking does require additional work on your part. The system notifies your application as it transitions to and from the background. These notification points are your cue to perform any important application tasks such as saving user data.

As stated ad nauseum that is Apples backgrounding system and FAS is not listing all apps that are currently using active resources.

Again, test this yourself. Install and launch, say, 50 apps. Then restart your device and then check FAS. it will list all the apps right back to the very first one. its unbelievable you still trying to say that all apps in FAS are still running in the background.

The only thing FAS has to do with active or suspended apps is it allows you to kill them if they so happen to be using resources. If they are not then deleting it from the FAS list does nothing. Its a list!

I'd really like to read up on this FAS. Have any documentation links?

Well I wish it would really worked that way so I can ignore it... but since that thing is making apps crash left and right I have no choice to open that "FAS" and close everthing in it every day.

If iOS doesn't do multitasking, then how is it that I can check a webpage while on a phone call?

Out of everyone here, you chose the right man to ask and put to the task.

Is it possible that this kind of crashing problems may happen to jailboken iPhones? Else I cannot see a possibility how one iOS application may cause a crash to the other, since as you mentioned they all run in individual sandboxes. I at least never saw anything like that happan.

Could you explain in detail how Android's implementation is better?

OMG! How on earth can you run left and right apps, while your middle app causes them to crash? I would say wake up young fellow it's just a bad dream. What you describe is pretty much impossible to happen, at least for non jailbroken iPhones. (If it may happen to jailbroken iPhones, I simply don't know).
\

I agree. This poster has no idea what they are talking about. They have either tampered with the phone or are making all of this up.

They can drain the battery 10 times faster.

I can see how this implementation of fast-app-switching/multi-tasking (whatever you wanna call it) could be more useful than the current one.

For example, if each app window live-updated its content, say Safari loading a web page w/ lots of images, or Google Maps tracking me as I walk, or a status bar showing a download's progress.

I think they should start using that in Android phone ads. "The multitasking is so "real" it uses 10x the battery life!!1!!11! How cool is that?! I bet your iPhone can't do that ;p*"

*the smiley is sure to make iPhone users feel jealous.

sure looks very similar to multifl0w, an existing app for jailbroken devices.

Agreed, its identical to multifl0w from cydia. I have it running on my iphone 4 and wifes iphone 3gs.

ee

It can be a little squishy, and personal preferences and experience do factor into a users opinion on usability - but there is great value in actually designing an interface to be more intuitive, it's not different for everyone!

It is a difficult subject in many ways - for one thing you can't take what people say at face value as we're often not conscious of how we do things. But it's not just opinion. It is measurable.

fwiw, a little while back I had to take my iPhone 4 into the Genius bar because i was having an issue with the button recognising double clicks. As an aside at one point (as the Genius was playing around with the double click) he mentioned that it is a good idea to regularly go into the App Switcher and close down all the Apps in there that you aren't using.

Because this is a particularly fiddly and time-consuming process it really bugged me that i couldn't close down all backgrounded/frozen/running (pick your terminology...) apps at once. I did some digging and found a great Cydia app that allows you to do this.

If you're happy to jailbreak herbapou this might make your life easier. Now i simply hold down my home button for about 1 sec (less than the amount of time it takes to bring up Voice Control) and the iPhone will close down everything in the App Switcher. It also gives me the option to leave user-defined Apps running - eg Safari, Mail, Messages etc...

Super useful IF you feel that backgrounded apps are causing you issues. Of course Apple state that Apps will close down automatically if the system requires their memory to do other stuff, but I found it interesting that an Apple Genius had been trained to tell folks to manually shut down stuff in the App Switcher from time to time...

I think icons make more sense on a small screen. All text apps look exactly the same on an expose view, while their icons look different. On a largeger screen like that of an iPad however this could be more useful then icons because you can read some text whilestill in expose.

Exactly.

Excellent point. I couldn't put my finger on what felt wrong about the design, but that's it.

You can close all apps at once by performing a reset by holding the the Home and Power buttons until the iPhone/iPod/iPad restarts. This way everything in the memory is erased and the system restarts. But remember, those apps in the "recent apps" bar will still be there and that mean nothing more than them being recent apps. Being in the "Recent Apps". or whatever you want to call it, doesn't mean that the app is running or doing anything. It is there so you can get access to recent apps without having to leave the current app. For me it is useful in some cases where you are working on two apps copying and pasting text/pictures from one to another.

Disagree. I found the iOS task switcher quite intuitive. I guessed correctly that pressing the (X) from the task list would kill the process. It is highly congruent with the Springboard UI. It is minimalist and clean.

Of course I took him to task, but he didn't come back because there is no FAS documentation, I checked. Maybe it is one of those urban legends.

If i leave angry birds (or some other game) sitting i n the background, my battery dissapears far quicker than it usually does. So the iphone must have real multitasking...

I believe he was referring to FAS (fast app switching) as an action not the feature. I personally couldn't find anything about that app dock (I like to call it recent app dock). But from my experience it is basically a recent apps list/dock. An app being on that list doesn't necessarily mean that it support any of the seven background features (audio, VOIP, location, Push Notification, Local Notification, Task Finishing, Fast App Switching). However, closing an app from the recent app list will cause the app to terminal and in few cases the background action to ends. The only background action that stay active even after the app is terminated are VOIP, PN, and LN.

There is very little because its nothing but a list of recently used apps. On the other hand there is plenty of multitasking in iOS because that takes effort from a developer. The only documentation you will find is that an app will not show up in FAS until you compile it for iOS 4.0. It was listed a feature that shows your recent app items. There is nothing more to it and nothing for devs to do so there is no needed documentation.

You are expecting me to prove a negative; that unless there is documentation from Apple that states something that would never be stated then you are somehow correct. You posed erroneous argument. You lost.

I don't disagree with your analysis, only your arrogance. I think that the current functionality might be improved by erasing all of the suspended app icons from the tray after a reboot but by no means does your assertion that all app icons in the tray are completely dead, inactive, history, etc, that makes no sense according to the official Apple documentation. And BTW closing with 'you lost' is a total concession on your part.

Video doesn't seem real. although anything is possible. Interface seems to exagerated for a 31/2"
screen.

Why dont you show me the documentation that shows that all apps in FAS are running in RAM and that they are all restarted when you restart your device. Can you find me any documentation at all that references RAM and suspend states with FAS?

"left and right" was a figure of speech (obviousy a bad one) for saying I had apps crashing on a regular basis if I dont clean the FAS. My ipad/iphone are not jailbreak btw and it pretty clear the crash are caused by all the apps in the FAS because if I remove them the apps stop crashing. The apps that crash when the FAS is crowded are Dungeon defenders, New york Times, Popular Science, The elements, TouTV. The FAS is not supposed to cause this, but it does. Maybe I have an bad app that corrupts something in the OS memory sectors.

And dont say its impossible, there is no such a thing as an 100% protected OS. At work we have to reboot our IBM mainframe once a week even if they are not "suppose" to have memory corruption. ANY computer needs a reboot from time to time no matter how much the OS is suppose to be protected from memory leaks or corruption of the OS memory sectors.

Put me in the group of people who don't like multi-tasking on a phone in most cases.

I did but you apparently didn't read it so I have copied and pasted from my ealier post #86

To preserve battery life, most applications are suspended by the system shortly after entering the background. A suspended application remains in memory but does not execute any code. This behavior allows an application to resume quickly when it is relaunched without consuming battery power in the meantime. However, applications may be allowed to continue running in the background for the following reasons....

Why do you think that has any barring on the apps listed in FAS? Where is your proof that any and all apps listed in FAS are using RAM?

Again, what you quoted is what one would expect. What isn't stated is a damn thing about what the icons in FAS represent yet you keep insisting I'm wrong about apps in FAS mean they are all in RAM, even after a restart.

Not really sure why you do this Solip. Seems like you deliberately just try to be difficult sometimes?

It is actually really clear that "backgrounded" apps are simply those that have been opened, then "sent to the background" by the user returning to the home screen. All backgrounded apps are then displayed in the App Switcher (which might more accurately be called the "Background Bar")

Per mstone's quote, MOST backgrounded apps are suspended shortly after being sent to the background bar. In this suspended state they remain in memory, but don't execute any code - this allows them to quickly resume from the same state rather than having to restart. Not all apps are suspended though - SOME, which we might call "true multitasking apps" take advantage of certain APIs that allow them to continue to execute code whilst backgrounded, eg iPod app, Pandora etc.

The background bar serves several purposes then. Firstly, it allows you to quickly switch between recently used apps (with their current state preserved), secondly it gives the user more control over "true multitasking apps" by allowing him/her to elect to manually close them down/kill any background processes if so desired. Theoretically this shouldn't be necessary in that Apple have stated that apps will be automatically killed if the phone starts to run out of memory, however as mentioned previously, I've had an Apple Genius tell me that it's good practice to manually kill apps from time to time.

(As an aside, the cydia app "Remove Background" is useful for doing this in that it removes all apps from the background bar AND kills all app processes too - the equivalent of jiggling/killing each individual app one by one.)

I think where people seem to get confused by the Background Bar is that it does several different things, whilst failing to really differentiate between them. It combines: "system apps" (which traditionally would always be open, and shouldn't really need to ever be closed eg phone, messages, iPod, Safari etc), PLUS a list of backgrounded recently opened apps which are in a suspended state, PLUS apps that are running background processes. I guess the reason they don't differentiate between these three different groups is to keep things as simple as possible for the user, but the downside is that for some people (Solip?) it actually seems to lead to confusion. Personally I would like to see some sort of visual differentiation between apps that are actually running background processes and those that aren't (with perhaps even the ability to see how much memory each app is using... however this is obviously extremely un-iOS-ey)

It's unbelieavable that you think FAS list all apps using RAM. Speaking of difficult, how hard it is to check your resources to know these apps are all running in FAS. I have just under 50 in mine which correspond to te exact number of apps located on my Home Screen.

What's with calling it a background bar? Are people so unclea on how to use their iPhone they don't know they can reaccess suspended apps from anywhere in the system, not just FAS? This is a simple concept people!

Why is this concept so hard for some people? Do you think 512MB RAM is really enough for all your apps and OS to run constantly? Where does that mental disconnect come from.

This is like explaining to people the sun doesn’t go around the Earth and having them tell you know because they can see it with their own eyes. Just because FAS is a bar that sits in the “background" until you double-tap the Home Button does not mean that all those apps in FAS are running in the background. It’s a list! Plain and simple. I’ve shown plenty tests you can do to test this. There are also paid apps you can get to see the RAM usage after you power cycle your device to see that every app you’ve ever opened is not loaded in RAM simply because it’s in the FAS recent apps list.