Apple invites iPhone developers to test live Push Notifications

Originally Posted by melgross

It's good to see that things are moving forwards.

Originally Posted by addabox

I guess it's too much to hope for at this point, but I really wish Apple could come up with some kind of unified notifications screen, assignable as a home screen (plus dock for primary apps). Maybe "above" the existing home screen? In practice that would work much like Android's pull-down notification screen, with docked icon badges working like the top bar alerts.

Using changes to the icon badge is cool, but pop-up notifications proliferating from multiple apps is not.

Originally Posted by addabox

I guess it's too much to hope for at this point, but I really wish Apple could come up with some kind of unified notifications screen, assignable as a home screen (plus dock for primary apps). Maybe "above" the existing home screen? In practice that would work much like Android's pull-down notification screen, with docked icon badges working like the top bar alerts.

Using changes to the icon badge is cool, but pop-up notifications proliferating from multiple apps is not.

Originally Posted by addabox

I guess it's too much to hope for at this point, but I really wish Apple could come up with some kind of unified notifications screen, assignable as a home screen (plus dock for primary apps). Maybe "above" the existing home screen? In practice that would work much like Android's pull-down notification screen, with docked icon badges working like the top bar alerts.

Using changes to the icon badge is cool, but pop-up notifications proliferating from multiple apps is not.

Originally Posted by CanadianMac2008

Yeah I'm agreed on this one. I don't think another home screen is the solution but they need something because the pop-up notifications are really annoying and intrusive. You have to click them and can't do anything until you choose one option. The Pre seems to handle this pretty well and I've heard Android does as well. Also, I think as some have mentioned, we need notifications on the unlock screen. I would love say an option to click a Mail icon when there is a read message and then perform a slide to unlock to jump directly to the Mail app with the new messages shown. The slide to unlock could maybe change color and the other icons (if there are some, could be faded). If you change your mind about jumping to mail you could tap anywhere beside the unlock or the Mail button, which would return you to the regular unlock screen. Something along these lines would be great I think.

Furthermore, let's see better app organization. I wouldn't be surprised if maybe Apple is leaving this to an updated iTunes when 3.0 is released though...

Thoughts???

Originally Posted by w00master

Agree 100% on these thoughts. With all of the updates coming for iPhone 3.0, personally I really don't have that much more that I am missing EXCEPT for 2 things (as listed above): a revamped notification system (I like the Android/G1 methodology) and a way to better organize apps on the iPhone.

I like the swipe idea, where if you swipe down, you'll see all of your notifications. Love that. Apple, are you listening? LOL

w00master

Originally Posted by CanadianMac2008


Anyone want to add their opinions on how flexible Push will be?

Originally Posted by melgross

Obviously there are things it can't do.

But I think that Push is just a step along the way. Once the capability of the device grows enough, has enough RAM for program space, and better power managements from all ends, then we'll see background apps running.

It's not as though Apple has totally disguarded the idea.

Originally Posted by arsan

Half baked efforts are simply not going to be sufficient This is like fixing an airplane wing with duck-tape, it won't work! On my current iphone, I already have skype, using mobilesubstrate, backgrounder, you can simply have it as an application running in the background. Once you install the "backgrounder" and try it only for five minutes, you will understand how useless the whole notification system is. Quick example, let's say you listen to pandora radio, or in my case the iphone app for a public radio station and you want to do something totally outrageous like writing a text message WHILE listening, you should be able to do it, or am I missing something? Is it better to quit my radio show and read the email and relaunch the radio app? Why should I tolerate that?

Or, let's say you want to go for a jog and use the "running gypsy" application which is great to track where you went running, time, distance, pace, etc., and you have your ipod and want to change the play list or podcast, and since you can't truly run it in the background, the application won't work anymore, no notification system can solve this problem, I need the GPS data, pace data and once the app is quit, it won't be recorded. Before the "backgrounder" application, I had to create smart playlist of my podcasts in a certain order so that once I launch the running gypsy program, I would never have to quit the app. Why do I have to tolerate that?

The competition is not sitting still. The excuse of battery life, lack of processing power simply is not credible when even windows mobile units can do it, RIM can do it, especially when Pre will be coming up with an even more refined multi-tasking platform, a platform that seems to not shackle you in your one app at a time UI, but a user interface designed to making multi tasking as easy as possible. That is the innovation I had hoped to see in 3.0, and what a disappointment it has been...

The notification system does not feel like a sincere effort, it is just some "see, we have a remedy" useless attempt. I remember those days where the lack of multi tasking of Mac OS 9 was being justified as necessary and people would even defend it, while multi tasking was already available on Windows platforms.

An inferior technology or a process does not have much of an argument or justification. If couple hacker kids are sitting down writing "backgrounder" applications to enhance their iphones, the best approach would be to yield and offer a better native multi-tasking solution, nothing half baked, real background processing with necessary software optimizations for good resource management and an awesome user interface that we are used to getting from the design team of Apple.

Keeping a closed platform has its business model advantages, but sometimes humans like a platform too much and they are willing to use their brain power to circumvent the artificial barriers created to keep them dependent on whatever the company's business objectives are. This multi tasking battle won't go away until Apple yields, just like with the app store like we have seen last year!

Originally Posted by addabox

I guess it's too much to hope for at this point, but I really wish Apple could come up with some kind of unified notifications screen, assignable as a home screen (plus dock for primary apps). Maybe "above" the existing home screen? In practice that would work much like Android's pull-down notification screen, with docked icon badges working like the top bar alerts.

Using changes to the icon badge is cool, but pop-up notifications proliferating from multiple apps is not.

Originally Posted by arsan

Half baked efforts are simply not going to be sufficient This is like fixing an airplane wing with duck-tape, it won't work! On my current iphone, I already have skype, using mobilesubstrate, backgrounder, you can simply have it as an application running in the background. Once you install the "backgrounder" and try it only for five minutes, you will understand how useless the whole notification system is. Quick example, let's say you listen to pandora radio, or in my case the iphone app for a public radio station and you want to do something totally outrageous like writing a text message WHILE listening, you should be able to do it, or am I missing something? Is it better to quit my radio show and read the email and relaunch the radio app? Why should I tolerate that?

Before the "backgrounder" application, I had to create smart playlist of my podcasts in a certain order so that once I launch the running gypsy program, I would never have to quit the app. Why do I have to tolerate that?

The competition is not sitting still. The excuse of battery life, lack of processing power simply is not credible when even windows mobile units can do it, RIM can do it, especially when Pre will be coming up with an even more refined multi-tasking platform, a platform that seems to not shackle you in your one app at a time UI, but a user interface designed to making multi tasking as easy as possible. That is the innovation I had hoped to see in 3.0, and what a disappointment it has been...

The notification system does not feel like a sincere effort, it is just some "see, we have a remedy" useless attempt. I remember those days where the lack of multi tasking of Mac OS 9 was being justified as necessary and people would even defend it, while multi tasking was already available on Windows platforms.

An inferior technology or a process does not have much of an argument or justification. If couple hacker kids are sitting down writing "backgrounder" applications to enhance their iphones, the best approach would be to yield and offer a better native multi-tasking solution, nothing half baked, real background processing with necessary software optimizations for good resource management and an awesome user interface that we are used to getting from the design team of Apple.

Keeping a closed platform has its business model advantages, but sometimes humans like a platform too much and they are willing to use their brain power to circumvent the artificial barriers created to keep them dependent on whatever the company's business objectives are. This multi tasking battle won't go away until Apple yields, just like with the app store like we have seen last year!

Originally Posted by arsan

Half baked efforts are simply not going to be sufficient This is like fixing an airplane wing with duck-tape, it won't work!

Originally Posted by solipsism

QotD: We've seen Apple's vendor controlled and run App Store being copied* by Google and RiM, should we also expect that Push Notification servers will be copied as well, even if other vendors allow for bona fide** background apps***?

Originally Posted by ajmas

Background apps can be achieved by jailbreak, but to put backgrounding issues into perspective:

- People have ranted and raved about 'poor' battery life on the iPod and any other devices Apple realeases, eveven when an iPod can get three days worth of charge.
- Everyone says smartphone 'x' allows for background tasks. Sure, but how long do you go between charges and what is running in the background? I want figures and data.
- My experience with some smart phone is a difference between two days charge and 4 hours, when applications are backgrounding.
- How big should the battery be before people start complaining the iPhone is too fat?
- Dedicated hand-held GPSs only get a day on charge, and this is the main task, so if this is in the background of a phone, this will hurt.

I am sure Apple will allow background applications at some point in time, but if allowing means 4 hour charge times, even more complaints about battery times, then I am sure Apple will resist techs that insist on background applications.

Originally Posted by melgross

It's one thing to have two or three, maybe even four or five apps in the background, but what happens when there are that 20 or 30?

The phone will need much more app RAM, and as this article correctly points out already, a much better processor:

Originally Posted by ajmas

And the battery proving to be a limiting factor.

Originally Posted by addabox

So given all that, let me ask you a question that I've asked before, in a different context:

Why do you think Apple is approaching this the way they are?

Is it because they are lazy? Incompetent? Stupid? Is that that they inexplicably want the iPhone to be less competitive? They hate their customers? Steve Jobs is insane?

According to you, the barriers to multitasking are trivial. All their competitors can do it, kids in their basement with jail-broken phones can do it, and Apple's "excuses" are all laughable. It's not really about CPU heft or battery life or complexity. They're lying.

Why? Apple seems to have done pretty well with the iPhone, to date, so they can't be complete idiots/hellspawn/crazy. In fact, failure to implement such a vital feature, which is so simple to do, would be seem to be a genuinely bizarre lapse, given Apple's track record here.

Can you maybe clarify what you think Apple's motives are, for failing to deliver a wonderful feature that would require almost no effort, have no down side, and massively enhance the iPhone's desirability?

Originally Posted by arsan

The question "Why" is a good one, I think one can only guess. One can further extend the series of WHY questions:

- when people were crying for third party apps on the iphone platform, WHY did Steve Jobs insist on having a half baked (you can use the same duct tape metaphor here if you like) web applications instead of native applications?

- when people did the jailbreaking, why did Apple finally give up its grip (a little bit) and created an app store with native third party apps with a severely limited SDK?

- Why is there no real Gmail app like the one found in BlackBerry for example, almost any other phone has a specific gmail app?

- Why would the skype app not take benefit of the 3G even though Skype executives are publicly saying that there is nothing wrong with the app and it would work perfectly on 3G? (and it does, just this morning I was on it for 15 minutes with my dad overseas)

- Why is Iphone available only through AT&T?

- Why is there no MMS?

- Why can't you have horizontal keyboard (3.0 will do this it seems)

- Why no video recording?

- Why initially support DRM and now we are DRM-Free? Why are videos still with DRM? Why is the rental only 24 hours but not 48 or 72 making Apple TV useless in my opinion?

Most people would consider the iphone a platform that is very attractive for mobile computing. The gateway to this platform is currently controlled by Apple through the SDK and App Store process. It is a business decision to have this control in place. When iphone first came out, the control was absolute, only Apple could provide applications, then the grass roots efforts became so loud that Apple had to relent and open up App Store. Now there is similar grumbling against the decision of not allowing background applications and against draconian artificial controls, and this grumbling will eventually force Apple to re-consider their current policies, piece by piece, just like they did since the launch of this platform.

I do feel that Steve Jobs has a great vision and the talent to monetize innovation. It is only natural to try to control the revenue stream whether it is by protecting your strategic alliances (don't allow tethering, don't allow Skype on 3G for the sake of AT&T's phone minute revenues).

Sometimes, our (consumers) interests and the interests of the corporations that provide us these innovative products and services may not be perfectly aligned, thus it is quite natural to see friction. We had friction since the launch of the iphone platform and this friction is the reason the platform got better and better which each iteration and I welcome it.

Companies need to maximize their revenues, and we consumers also want maximum satisfaction from the products we buy. It is in my interest to have as many features as possible on my iphone, such as background apps, skype, horizontal keyboard, MMS, video recording, etc. As a single user, I can only have a tiny voice in nudging the corporation to what I believe the direction of the product's development should take. The biggest testament of this relationship can be seen by simply looking at the near past and the interaction between the customers and the corporation. Now Apple no longer bricks iphones. Now you don't have to go to the store to activate an iphone, soon you will get "notifications" and soon after everybody hates it, you will get true background processing, because those notifications are simply not good enough.

I guess the answer to "why" is complex, but I certainly don't believe the team at Apple is lazy or malicious. They are just trying to make sure they get the maximum benefit for Apple and by constructively discussing these issues, we are also contributing to this innovation and helping out the company deliver products that we really want and enjoy.

Sorry, I could not deliver a straight forward answer to your "why" question...

Thanks.

Originally Posted by melgross

How do you allocate processor cycles between 20 to 30 programs? Especially when there aren't that many processor cycles to begin with?

Originally Posted by ivan.rnn01

There might have been 620 millions of clock cycles available each second. OK, the battery (or Infineon chip?) helps itself to nearly 200 millions per second. The video playback is proven to be of decent quality with 440 millions of clock tics per second.
Let Apple send Infineon to hell and give 200 MHz to 19 more apps in background. 10 MHz to each app, not that bad, I dare say. Macintosh is said to have been capable of offering less.

Originally Posted by melgross

That's not a lot of cycles.

So, sure, it looks like a big number, but all numbers are big when it comes to computers. Compared to a typical desktop, those numbers are small indeed.

As I said, not many cycles.

The old Macs didn't multitask. When the later ones did, just like PC's that began to do it as well, they bogged down.

The truth is that most of the programs used back then were much smaller, and much less complex, than the programs on the iPhone now.

It really took two cpu's or cores, before multitasking became useful.

Originally Posted by ivan.rnn01

I was kidding, surely. This is why I'm not gonna enter in arguments. Processor speed, however, isn't key limitation, when it comes to multitasking. It never was. Just recall, <200 MHz desktop computers did multitasking 15 years ago by no means worse, than modern multiprocessor machines.

Originally Posted by ivan.rnn01

Just recall, <200 MHz desktop computers did multitasking 15 years ago by no means worse, than modern multiprocessor machines.

Originally Posted by ivan.rnn01

I was kidding, surely. This is why I'm not gonna enter in arguments. Processor speed, however, isn't key limitation, when it comes to multitasking. It never was. Just recall, <200 MHz desktop computers did multitasking 15 years ago by no means worse, than modern multiprocessor machines.

Originally Posted by melgross

I disagree with you on this. I used those "multitasking" machines. Unless you were using programs that did nothing most of the time, they could just stop, dead.

Try to use two programs that actually needed the cpu, and you couldn't get anything done. The computers were too weak.

So sure, you could word process, because that only used 10% of the computers cycles unless you were scrolling down a large document, when the computer, even then, was too slow. If you're old enough, you might remember that.

Try to do that while a large spreadsheet was recalculating, and it would take twice as long to finish.

Heaven help you if you tried to do two things that needed some speed.

In fact, today's multi-core machines are best used for multitasking.

But, even now, with my dual 2.66 Mac Pro, if I try to render a movie in FCS, and work on a large Photoshop file, the computer bogs down.

Originally Posted by solipsism

They also weren't running modern programs which are used to demanding more from processors. Then consider that the iPhone is already using a good portion of it's available resources for other functions before you even get to 3rd-party apps.

Originally Posted by Carniphage

The iPhone is running OS X (effectively Unix). And Unix *is* multi-tasking in its boots. The iPhone has always been multi-tasking - and at any one time is running a bunch of tasks.

What the iPhone is not doing is allowing multiple 3rd party applications to run simultaneously.

On a portable device with a single screen, there is limited benefit to running two applications at once. Only one can interact with the user at a time. Unlike a desktop we can't open two windows at once. The benefit to multi-application running is small.

There are however a lot of dis-benefits to multiple applications. If an application is great, is reasonable that each application gets the lion's share of memory, and cpu performance.

If one application demands 90% of the device's resources. Then two apps will never play nicely together. If an application had to work with only a 1/5 of memory and a 1/4 of the CPU, it would dramatically weaken the experience of the device.

App switching rather than sharing is a better compromise. We don't want apps in the background draining battery, consuming resources. We do want to swiftly and seamlessly shift between one program and another.

The one app at a time rule is a good one, but what do we lose?

Audio is one. A player sits in background and continues to play audio while we do something else. Apple has made a special-case whereby the iPod app does just this. This meets most requirements but not when the audio is streaming from an application like Pandora.

Is this a deal killer for the phone buying public. Nah. It's minor.

The second case is having an app in the background doing something trivial, waiting for an external condition. A new email, a new message - etc. Again, the SMS app and the Email work in the background anyway.

The new push notification system solves the problem for third party apps, without having the requirement for the app to stay resident in memory.

These are sensible, well thought-out engineering compromises. They offer most of the benefits of multi-tasking apps with few of the disbenefits. The beneficiary is the consumer. And while people say "Wahh - I wanna browse the web, while listening to LastFM" - A lot more people would whine if the price of that change was a reduction in performance.

But I don't think this process is over. There Apple can continue to improve the device.

A better application notification system would be cool. A home-screen with twitter like scrolling list of notifications would be useful. Especially if we have lots of Apps delivering many push notifications.

I think the objection to app-switching would be much less if the app-switching was instant.
A five second delay between one app and the next is too long. So I would welcome Apple working on reducing that delay to zero. If the most recent shut-down apps could archive themselves into an reserved area of flash memory, an ultra-fast relaunch might be possible.

It would be trivial for Apple to allow multiple apps. But such a change would make the device worse and not better.

C.

Originally Posted by ivan.rnn01

I am 41, if you wanna know. And I was old enough to have used those machines professionally. They rendered 3D models and played mp3 music simultaneously. Received and sent packets over LAN and dispatched all these activities at the same time. I'd say 50% of lemmings would be happy to have only that on iPhone.
image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...t_and_rear.jpg
image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...x-Indigo2.jpeg
What we had yet to see were streaming even audio and video. And yes it's video that requires all those clock cycles now.