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The main problem with iPhone, not a lack/presence of something, but the total control from Apple, even when you use it. People who are not comfortable with this idea will never buy iGadgets.

Yet that control (which is far from “total”) is also one of the main strengths—and a strength for FAR more users than the number who object to that control. The people who even think about those things seriously are a small niche (though heavily represented in tech forums like this, and with very valid points to make). And of that niche, many of them parrot objections without actually trying an iPhone in any serious way to observe the benefits of Apple’s control. In fact, I’ve known a number of such Apple objectors who now carry an iPhone and love it. They still object to the “control” but they enjoy the benefits daily, and Apple has their money :) So never say never!

Because much as we hate to admit it, that control doesn’t just have a downside, it has very real benefits to users too.

Think about it: does any other device have the strengths of the iPhone? The intuitive UI polish and the sheer number of quality apps in the app store? These things do matter, and some control, unfortunately, is needed to make them happen. I like having choice; and I like having the choice to pick Apple’s way. If Apple were just like every other company, not a perfectionist, then we’d lose that choice, and the iPhone would be a lesser product. (In fact, it might have been a flop and then Android, WebOS and touchscreen smartphones in general would not have even taken off at all.)

It’s a question of which benefits you want that determines whether you appreciate the iPhone or would be better off battling the poor quality apps and UI on some other device. I dislike Apple’s control on principle, but in actual day-to-day use I LOVE the results of it.

But I do hope Apple keeps improving their app store review process (as they have indeed been doing). There’s a lot to criticize there. Meanwhile, I’m glad the Android option exists, and I hope WebOS takes off too. Window Mobile 7 Phone SP 7 Zune (or whatever) I don’t have high hopes for :eek:
 
Flash, or the lack thereof.

This is already the primary complaint.
It's frustrating you cant see so many pages on the net.

For something apple thinks is dead, it sure causes us many issues.
I for one believe they wont add it because it would take away from their precious app store.
 
I can live without multitasking, but it would be a nice feature to have.
It's not technically impossible although it would lower the battery life (but then again, so does Push and specially Push Mail) but it would need to be very cleverly implemented if they want it to be successful.
 
Here's what I'm thinking as a way to do multi-tasking and not killing battery life/smoothness of other apps. Apps will have a choice of two different ways to act when in a multi-tasking mode.

1. Full running - This is the traditional way, where the app is running like normal. Apps going this route would be things like Pandora, Navigon, etc. Basically, apps that require constant processing to accomplish their purpose even when the user isn't looking at them. My guess is most apps wouldn't need to be in this mode.

2. Freeze apps - This is where I see most apps falling. Most apps really don't need to be running while you're not looking at them, so why waste the proc cycles? This could be integrated with push notifications so that if one comes in for a running app, that app can be unfrozen in the background, allowed to update, then refrozen. Then, when the user comes back to that app, it's updated with the new notification waiting for them. Examples would be things like Facebook, Twitter apps, and IM apps.

Thoughts?

Case 2 is what used to be called "task switching", and it has little battery impact. It makes sense for most applications to behave this way - so you can switch without losing your workflow.

With case 1, you also don't have to run things with full priority. An IM client could be given a slice of time every few seconds, just long enough to process its updates.

The big impact area that's going to affect the usefulness of multitasking is going to be available memory.
 
i wonder what the iphone/ipad haters will move on to as their primary complaint if this is true?

I think Flash will serve that purpose for awhile yet. It took more than a year after the first iMac was introduced before people realized and acknowledged that floppy drives were indeed irrelevant, just as Steve Jobs had said. Flash is going to follow that same curve, only the time frame is in doubt.
 
The one thing I never understood is why developers of fitness and GPS apps have not integrated something like Pandora in to their apps. Then there would be no need to run two apps or switch between apps to change stations etc...
 
i wonder what the iphone/ipad haters will move on to as their primary complaint if this is true?

They'll always have non-swappable battery.

And imagine their non-swappable-battery rage once multitasking starts sucking the juice. ;)
 
How about a double-finger swipe down to go back to the last app/thing you were doing and a double-finger swipe up to go forward?

Terrible implementation. Multitouch gestures won't be used for app switching; what if an app wants to use a double finger swipe for its own use? Plus that's confusing for the user. Some people use more than one finger inadvertently when they're in photo mode to go back and forth between photos. You don't want to switch out of the app. The OS/apps shouldn't have to check what orientation the iPhone is in.

It'll be tied to the home button, like it is currently. They'll be a toggle switch in system preferences where your apps run in the background or they don't, maybe with hard limit you can tweak, say the last 3 apps. (Might also depend on how Apple wants to support he hardware, say the 3g only 2 apps max and 3gs more.)

To switch between them you hit the home button, like you would anyway except if you have multitasking enabled it brings up a little viewer to show your couple apps running (think when you hold cmd-tab on mac or alt-tab in windows); tap an app's icon to switch to it. If you hit the home button again while showing apps you have running it goes back to the home screen. To quit an app, you hold the home button for a longer time, say 3 seconds (kinda like force quitting). If you launch a new app and it's more than the number of apps specified in prefs, the OS quits the app you haven't switched back to in awhile, basically doing a least used approach (the OS could be smart and not quit, say Pandora or aim if it's using more cpu usage and another app is not.)
 
Haven't Apple confirmed that the iPad won't do multi-tasking? If that's right, I can't see it coming out on the iPhone any time soon. If a multi-tasking OS 4.0 was imminent, I would have thought they'd have held off the iPad launch until then.

You're thinking of the "old Apple", this is the "new Apple".

See the old Apple wouldn't release a product until it was ready for prime time. Timetables be damned, investors be damned, profits be damned. The old Apple would hold the iPad until 4.0 was released so it could do everything it was planned to do.

The new Apple not so much. Their stockholders expect too much from them and Apple is doing what they can to make them happy first instead of make the consumer happy first.

I remember the very buggy iPhone 2.0 release that was nowhere near ready. It had obvious bugs the moment you started using it but Apple released it anyway. We all got to beta test it in production. I remember wasting money on the .Me service that was pure crap. If a company besides Apple released MobileMe the exact same way Apple did it they'd be bankrupt right now as it was nothing but a total disaster.

I remember Apple promising push notifications in 2.x that didn't come until 3.0 a year later. The "old Apple" would never promise and not deliver, they'd just delay the release of the product until it was ready.

The "new Apple" released a half-assed iPad to make sales with no compelling new features over a touch or iPhone. It is in essential just a bigger screen. The "old Apple" would of waited until 4.0 was ready to be demoed and showed off the iPad with lots of new features. Maybe they didn't want to promise features they have planned in 4.0 but might not be able to implement because they'll run out of time like they did with push. See the old Apple worked off product readiness so they could release the product when it's done. The new Apple focuses on release dates and quarterly earnings so they have to release updates/products with features lacking.
 
Multitasking doesn't require a multicore processor.

I know that... And I am well aware that the iPhone is already doing multitasking. But the first gen iPhone could do MMS and Apple didn't support it, there will always be one or two things they will not support on the old hardware.
 
Lets hope it is not an iPhone 4G specific feature and just an OS only feature.

Yeah I am not sure why people are speculating this will only work on the 4th generation hardware. I would assume at the very worst that the 3GS would also have this functionality.
 
I think Apple were right to seperate the iPhone OS 4 and iPad events, since even if the new features of OS 4 are sexy, they would have detracted from the iPad as a totally new device / market / experience and instead being just a device within the OS 4 family. Of course, whether they pulled that off has been debated to death.
 
I know that... And I am well aware that the iPhone is already doing multitasking. But the first gen iPhone could do MMS and Apple didn't support it, there will always be one or two things they will not support on the old hardware.

That's true, but if they're going to do that I'd bet they'll do it in a graduated way, they way they've dropped software support from old Macs - they'll exclude the original iPhone and the 3G, but allow the upgrade on the 3GS and new model.
 
Does multitasking matter now? ;)

I do hope it comes to the platform. That extra RAM the 3GS has is ripe for some multitasking fun!

Enjoy iPhone fans! :cool:
 
Some of you people are absolutely crazy. You're actually unhappy that Apple could put in the multitasking option?! Tell you what, if you don't like it, DON'T USE IT. That's what conscious human beings with choices get to do. Mindless drones are the ones that prefer to have no choice at all so that they don't have to think, and it's all disguised in a veil of "simplicity."

Anything that Apple can add to my iPhone's OS to make it possibly more capable is amazing news to me. It may hurt battery life, and there may be trade-offs. But you get to choose whether to use it or not.

Also, I'm tired of the "just jailbreak" argument, because right now the dev team is on a bit of a hiatus, and with the most recent 3.1.3 release there is no jailbreak, which is quite a bummer for me. It actually sounds like they're waiting for OS 4.0 too... which means that just as soon as I can jailbreak, the iPhone will natively do multitasking anyway.
 
This is a totally sincere question:

Can anybody give me a case for simultaneous running apps that doesn't revolve around Pandora? I don't use Pandora — tried it once, didn't care for it — but I can see the reasoning there. But I've literally never heard a single argument for it that didn't amount to "I wanna do other stuff while I run Pandora."

Can any of you guys help me out? It seems like there's this sound and well-fleshed-out business case for simultaneous running apps, but I didn't get the memo.
 
I don't expect full and free for all multi-tasking, as you could quickly run into resource contention/exhaustion, performance degradation and a degraded user experience.

I would expect a limit on the amount of processes allowed to multi-task and possibly even a new SDK call for backgrounding/multi-tasking which will only be allowed for light weight processes (determined in the approval process).

I don't know what the mechanism will be like, but I will be very surprised if you can just multi-task freely any number of any apps. I expect something to deal with the more specific examples like back-grounding Pandora.
 
this is the most exciting news i've heard all year!! iphone desperately needed a UI overhaul. I really hope the declutter the notification system, make it less obtrusive like facebook notifications or something. theres so many tweaks that are needed to spice up the iphone software. multitasking shoulda been here last year.

I hope apple comes through this time, I dont like waiting another 6 months!

Totally right! So sick of the open, close, open, close routine all the time on my phone. As well as 50 tabs in my normal browser, I'm a serial multitasker and if Apple make this right and get the hardware specs up to make it real fast, I'll be very happy.
 
Just install Backgrounder from Cydia. It does it wonderfully and it's easy to toggle for an app to run in the background, and easy to toggle it to close.

APPLE: Don't re-invent the wheel. Take a bucket of gold, give it to the Backgrounder app maker, take his code, and use it. No problems.

Code? Backgrounder just enables the code Apple already wrote for third party apps instead of just for Apple apps.

Hint - iPhone OS 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 all support multi-tasking already. The OS just enforces third party apps being one at a time.
 
This is a totally sincere question:

Can anybody give me a case for simultaneous running apps that doesn't revolve around Pandora?
Here are a situations I use multitasking on my Nexus One:

Uploading/downloading files via FTP whilst using your phone to do other things.
Copying and pasting text/pictures between various apps (using a task switcher)
GPS tracking/location based applications.
Realtime scrobbling of music played to Last.fm.
Twitter/Facebook/Instant messaging notifications (the iPhone notification system would need an overhaul for these to work well IMO).

I do believe some people will have some real uses for multitasking in iPhone OS.
 
This is a totally sincere question:

Can anybody give me a case for simultaneous running apps that doesn't revolve around Pandora? I don't use Pandora — tried it once, didn't care for it — but I can see the reasoning there. But I've literally never heard a single argument for it that didn't amount to "I wanna do other stuff while I run Pandora."

Can any of you guys help me out? It seems like there's this sound and well-fleshed-out business case for simultaneous running apps, but I didn't get the memo.

Many people jump all over multi-tasking purely because it's something other mobile phone operating systems have, regardless of how well they achieve it and what it does to device performance. Having owned two Windows Mobile devices, I've seen how it can be poorly implemented.

That being said, here's one example. I own approximately 80GB of music, and use a service called ZumoDrive to sync it to the cloud. With their iPhone app, I can stream any song I want at any time - freeing me from my iPhone 3G's 16GB storage limit. Of course, if I want to do anything else at the same time (as I usually do), I cannot without the ability to run a second app.

That's similar to Pandora, so here's another for instance. I do part time community moderation and thanks to Tweetie can access multiple Twitter accounts at once. If I spot news items I want to post while surfing in Safari, copying the URL into bit.ly in a second tab then closing Safari and opening Tweetie makes the flow disjointed.

It could be argued that putting robust browser functionality into Tweetie would help, and this is true, but then my phone is suddenly bloated by apps featuring more code and functionality than they need.
 
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