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.
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).
I can be extra pedantic and argue that Apple's Exposé is incorrect as there's no é character in the English alphabet, only e.
In fairness, Exposé is the trademark for an Apple feature so I guess they can spell it however they want.
But yes, you've stepped out of the wrong side from the Pedant Express - nobody here is going to get confused between Expose and Exposé.
Crikey! I'll see your extra pedantic and raise you a nit-pick. From the 'Acute Accent' page at Wiki (my added emphasis):
Quote:
As with other diacritical marks, a number of loanwords are sometimes spelled in English with an acute accent used in the original language: these include café, fiancé, fiancée, passé, roué, sauté, and touché. Retention of the accent is common only in the French ending é or ée, as in these examples, where its absence would tend to suggest a different pronunciation. Thus the French word résumé is commonly seen in English as resumé, with only one accent (but also with both or none).
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.
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.
It's a valid complaint. breaking terms of service has nothing to do with being a valid complaint.
I wish I could break into banks and steal a million without getting arrested. That's my complaint. Is it invalid? I think not.
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.
Why do you insist on making inaccurate comparisons between a mobile device and a desktop computing system? And why is anyone else with a valid viewpoint categorically a "sheep" or an "idiot" by disagreeing with you?
The critical aspect here is as much memory management as power management, depending on the device of course. You don't need to quit out of other apps (depending on your equipment and the apps if you are running Logic because MacOSX does a decent job of memory management, and on the desktop you have few if any of the battery management concerns that are part of the mobile device use paradigm.
Resource management in Android is based around "garbage collection" not application pre-emptive memory demand as you seemed to state above. As such the garbage collection function will create overhead in addition to whatever other apps you are running as well. Applications "sitting in memory" while not requiring huge amounts of cpu cycles, still require state checks and garbage collection checks or blocks, depending on whether they enjoy persistent or temporary states - which still uses the odd cpu cycle - run enough of those and you see cpu utilization that can impact performance.
Somehow you have lost sight of these very basic facts in your commentary and reached out with your hearty "sheep" and "idiot" invitations to support logical and ernest discussion. Very Nice.
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.
It's funny, I would have said exactly the same as you until this past Monday. I've always maintained that non-techy types really couldn't care less about multitasking, but on Monday my wife (far from techy) was complaining that when she'd been looking at her Yelp app, if she clicked to view the map, it automatically launched Maps, but that she had to re-start the Yelp app again to go back to it, so I guess non-techy users do want something along these lines as well.
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.
Apple has sold millions of iPhones without multitasking. I think it's pretty clear by now that normal users don't care. The tech-wannabes do but not the general public. If anyone thinks this will in any way silence the critics they are sorely mistaken. The critics will always find something to bitch about. Multitasking on the iPhone will probably not be implemented in the way critics want it to be so they will still have a hard-on for Apple and its products. Never fear, Apple critics are never satisfied, ever.
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.
This gives a sense of what the interface will be like, but it's not clear to me that we really know any more about how this will actually work. Will Apple really let any old 3rd party app run down the battery by doing a lot of unnecessary things in the background? Or will this be an enhanced system in which app states are saved and restored more seamlessly than before and with a nice interface, combined with some very limited capacity for actual background tasks, but only in approved scenarios?
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.
Quote:
I hope it's more like the latter than the former. If I put Monopoly in the "background", i sure don't want it to actually be doing anything back there. I just want to be able to quickly switch back to it without having to restart the app and work my way through its menus to get back to my game.
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.
Quote:
Also, i don't want apps spawning worker processes that somehow fail to die after the main app is quit.
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.
Quote:
It's inconceivable to me that Apple would allow such a scenario to take place, so I have to believe that there are some fetters on this multitasking.
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.
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.
Couldn't the app developers just do that themselves? I guess an Apple provided solution would be more consistent.
The iPod and iPhone have 128MB-256MB of RAM (and no virtual memory) and a CPU between 400MHz and 533MHz. Further, apps have been built for years assuming all of that is available to them.
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.
Both Mac OS X and iPhone OS include a fully-integrated virtual memory system that you cannot turn off; it is always on. Both system also provide up to 4 gigabytes of addressable space per 32-bit process. In addition, Mac OS X provides approximately 18 exabytes of addressable space for 64-bit processes. Even for computers that have 4 or more gigabytes of RAM available, the system rarely dedicates this much RAM to a single process.
So how much of the rest is bunk too? I'm not even going to delve into that.
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.
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.
Quote:
Originally Posted by chronster
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.
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)
Anyone who advocates for a closed-ecosystem app store is either an Apple shareholder/sheep or an idiot.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JeffDM
I don't get it either. Often, the defenders of the App store point to Windows to show is why the gatekeeper function is necessary, while OS X hasn't needed it and is relatively safe.
Huh. So name calling is cool as long as we pretend we're not talking to anyone in particular.
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.
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.
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.
Huh. So name calling is cool as long as we pretend we're not talking to anyone in particular.
Good to know, I guess.
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.
Comments
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.
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).
I can be extra pedantic and argue that Apple's Exposé is incorrect as there's no é character in the English alphabet, only e.
In fairness, Exposé is the trademark for an Apple feature so I guess they can spell it however they want.
But yes, you've stepped out of the wrong side from the Pedant Express - nobody here is going to get confused between Expose and Exposé.
Crikey! I'll see your extra pedantic and raise you a nit-pick. From the 'Acute Accent' page at Wiki (my added emphasis):
As with other diacritical marks, a number of loanwords are sometimes spelled in English with an acute accent used in the original language: these include café, fiancé, fiancée, passé, roué, sauté, and touché. Retention of the accent is common only in the French ending é or ée, as in these examples, where its absence would tend to suggest a different pronunciation. Thus the French word résumé is commonly seen in English as resumé, with only one accent (but also with both or none).
From Dictionary.com
ex·po·sé (ěk'spō-zā') n.
1. An exposure or a revelation of something discreditable.
2. A formal exposition of facts.
[French, past participle of exposer, to expose, from Old French; see expose.]
The English language eh? What a palaver!
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.
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.
It's a valid complaint. breaking terms of service has nothing to do with being a valid complaint.
I wish I could break into banks and steal a million without getting arrested. That's my complaint. Is it invalid? I think not.
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.
Why do you insist on making inaccurate comparisons between a mobile device and a desktop computing system? And why is anyone else with a valid viewpoint categorically a "sheep" or an "idiot" by disagreeing with you?
The critical aspect here is as much memory management as power management, depending on the device of course. You don't need to quit out of other apps (depending on your equipment and the apps if you are running Logic because MacOSX does a decent job of memory management, and on the desktop you have few if any of the battery management concerns that are part of the mobile device use paradigm.
Resource management in Android is based around "garbage collection" not application pre-emptive memory demand as you seemed to state above. As such the garbage collection function will create overhead in addition to whatever other apps you are running as well. Applications "sitting in memory" while not requiring huge amounts of cpu cycles, still require state checks and garbage collection checks or blocks, depending on whether they enjoy persistent or temporary states - which still uses the odd cpu cycle - run enough of those and you see cpu utilization that can impact performance.
Somehow you have lost sight of these very basic facts in your commentary and reached out with your hearty "sheep" and "idiot" invitations to support logical and ernest discussion. Very Nice.
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.
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.
Sigh.
It's funny, I would have said exactly the same as you until this past Monday. I've always maintained that non-techy types really couldn't care less about multitasking, but on Monday my wife (far from techy) was complaining that when she'd been looking at her Yelp app, if she clicked to view the map, it automatically launched Maps, but that she had to re-start the Yelp app again to go back to it, so I guess non-techy users do want something along these lines as well.
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.
Apple has sold millions of iPhones without multitasking. I think it's pretty clear by now that normal users don't care. The tech-wannabes do but not the general public. If anyone thinks this will in any way silence the critics they are sorely mistaken. The critics will always find something to bitch about. Multitasking on the iPhone will probably not be implemented in the way critics want it to be so they will still have a hard-on for Apple and its products. Never fear, Apple critics are never satisfied, ever.
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.
This gives a sense of what the interface will be like, but it's not clear to me that we really know any more about how this will actually work. Will Apple really let any old 3rd party app run down the battery by doing a lot of unnecessary things in the background? Or will this be an enhanced system in which app states are saved and restored more seamlessly than before and with a nice interface, combined with some very limited capacity for actual background tasks, but only in approved scenarios?
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.
I hope it's more like the latter than the former. If I put Monopoly in the "background", i sure don't want it to actually be doing anything back there. I just want to be able to quickly switch back to it without having to restart the app and work my way through its menus to get back to my game.
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.
Also, i don't want apps spawning worker processes that somehow fail to die after the main app is quit.
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.
It's inconceivable to me that Apple would allow such a scenario to take place, so I have to believe that there are some fetters on this multitasking.
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
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.
Couldn't the app developers just do that themselves? I guess an Apple provided solution would be more consistent.
The iPod and iPhone have 128MB-256MB of RAM (and no virtual memory) and a CPU between 400MHz and 533MHz. Further, apps have been built for years assuming all of that is available to them.
Where do you get the no virtual memory thing from?
From iPhone dev docs [Memory Usage Performance Guidelines] :
Both Mac OS X and iPhone OS include a fully-integrated virtual memory system that you cannot turn off; it is always on. Both system also provide up to 4 gigabytes of addressable space per 32-bit process. In addition, Mac OS X provides approximately 18 exabytes of addressable space for 64-bit processes. Even for computers that have 4 or more gigabytes of RAM available, the system rarely dedicates this much RAM to a single process.
So how much of the rest is bunk too? I'm not even going to delve into that.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Anyone who advocates for a closed-ecosystem app store is either an Apple shareholder/sheep or an idiot.
I don't get it either. Often, the defenders of the App store point to Windows to show is why the gatekeeper function is necessary, while OS X hasn't needed it and is relatively safe.
Huh. So name calling is cool as long as we pretend we're not talking to anyone in particular.
Good to know, I guess.
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.
People who make lists like this are assholes.
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.
Funny, Nokia had that same interface in S60/Symbian in 2002. Who is copying who?
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.
What he said!
Huh. So name calling is cool as long as we pretend we're not talking to anyone in particular.
Good to know, I guess.
You have to use the indefinite article.
This reminds me of the dildo scene from Fight Club...
People who make lists like this are assholes.
People who make fun of people who make lists are.....
Oh, never mind.