iOS 4 - serious Multitasking Implementation problem

[SpankWare]

Thats a really poor implementation of multitasking i think. There has to be a way -when closing an app- to decide if it goes in the background or closes completely. In earlier OS versions you could just hold the main button for a longer time and you could kill frozen apps for example, but if you do that now the speech dial function comes on, so thats not an option.
So i hope they find another easy way to do that.
I just find it curious that nobody at Apple saw that problem.

Your issue isn't with multitasking but with how your application's developer chose to implement it. I haven't spent any time reviewing the new multitasking functions but as a software developer in general I don't see any reason why your application couldn't be programmed to allow you to easily handle this situation. You shouldn't be blaming the platform, you should blame the application developer.

For example, Trapster uses the GPS and they recognized that some users like yourself might not have the forethought to realize that leaving a multitasked GPS application running will eventually wear out the battery. The Trapster developers added a method to notify you that you've left the GPS running so you can choose to close the app or not. Their solution wasn't eloquent in my opinion, but functional.

At this point you shouldn't find fault with how Apple chose to allow multitasking and instead provide adequate feedback to your application developer so they can enhance the application to work better for users like yourself.

 

[name99]

"HEY THEY MIGHT EVEN BE DOING A WHOLE OVERHAUL TO THE BACKGROUNDING IDEA. ASSUMING THEY SAW THAT EARLY ADAPTORS OF BACKGROUNDING ARE DOING IT SO WELL THAT EVEN IF IT WAS TRUE BACKGROUNDING IT WONT DRAIN THE BATTERY OR KILL THE RAM ."

Actually I think the backgrounding UI and implementation work pretty damn well. In particular apps are MUCH faster because switching between them does not involve relaunching them; and being able to flip back and forth between recently used apps feels just like command-tab on an OS X machine.

On my old iPhone I was reluctant to switch to another app to just perform some trivial task like make a note or look up something because of the time involved in launching the temp app and then reverting to the old app. On iOS 4 that fear has gone away. The system is thus that much more useful.

I don't understand why people are bitching so much about what Apple did here. I can only assume it is the usual fear of change, coupled with a lack of understanding of exactly what the benefits are.
Sure some apps right now don't work well. Skype 2.0, to take one notorious example, doesn't handle multi-tasking at all, and takes thirty sec to launch each time you switch to it. And we see a GPS app that is dumb about how it uses backgrounding. But these things will improve --- for heaven's sake there are a dozen apps in every category. If this bicycling app is still crap in a month, ditch it and switch to one that is not written by morons. (Personally if Skype don't get their act together within a month, I expect I will be switching to fring or some other more with-it company.)

 

[Jordan921]

So you opened a gps app that runs in the background and it's apples fault?
I guess it's hard to open the multitasking dock and closing it out.