Here are a situations I use multitasking on my Nexus One:
Hey, thanks for this. There's some thought-provoking stuff here.
Uploading/downloading files via FTP whilst using your phone to do other things.
I guess it's never occurred to me to use my phone this way. I'm trying to think of a situation where I've wanted to have a
file as opposed to a specific piece of information of some kind on my phone, and drawing a blank. But if that's something a person needs to do, then yes, that's a good case for simultaneous running apps.
Copying and pasting text/pictures between various apps (using a task switcher)
I do that all the time already. Well. Not
all the time. I probably have a need to paste something maybe once a fortnight or so. But still, got this one checked off.
GPS tracking/location based applications.
I don't follow. Can you explain what that means?
Realtime scrobbling of music played to Last.fm.
Pandora, in other words. Got that.
Twitter/Facebook/Instant messaging notifications (the iPhone notification system would need an overhaul for these to work well IMO).
I don't know about Facebook, but I use the other two, and it works fine for me as is. Maybe I'm just using them differently.
I do believe some people will have some real uses for multitasking in iPhone OS.
I'm sure you're right. But again, I'm just struggling to understand what those uses are. I'm trying to figure out if they're something I just haven't thought of yet but, once I do, will seem blindingly obvious, or if they're in the "FTP" category of things I can't imagine ever actually wanting to do, but I can see how they might exist as a really extreme fringe case.
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.
Right. That's the Pandora argument I talked about before.
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.
I guess I'm dumb this morning (espresso hasn't kicked in yet) but what does that have to do with simultaneous running apps? You have to copy an address, then do a thing, then copy the result of that address to another app. You're still switching apps regardless, and it's not like having the idle app running in the background would make that process any different, right? Still tryin' to understand here; thanks for being patient with me.
By the time the matter is answered, you've flicked between Safari and Mail many times and wonder why it was so hard. If true multitasking was enabled its likely the flicking would have been much faster and the task would have been much easier to complete.
Okay, maybe I just don't understand what "true multitasking" means. I thought we were talking about having more than one app running at a time. In your scenario, you're talking about going to a variety of Web pages, and composing an email, right? Am I crazy, or is that a matter of switching back and forth between Mail and Safari repeatedly
regardless of whether those apps are running in the background or whether they're stopped?
I just grabbed my phone and tried it. I opened up a new email, started typing. Then I hit the home button and then the Safari button. I surfed for a sec, then hit home and Mail. Back to my draft. Type type, then home, then Safari, surf surf.
I don't get the problem, I guess. The only thing I can think of that might be an issue is the fact that you can't see both Safari and Mail at the same time, but that's a function of screen size, not of whether Safari or Mail continue to run as background tasks after I hit the home button.
I guess I just think it'd be cool if everybody could come to some kind of consensus about what they think "multitasking" means. I was under the impression that it meant having an app do things while it's not actually on the screen the Pandora argument. It sounds like you guys are talking about the process of switching between apps, which is actually going to have to occur regardless of whether those apps continue to run or not after you switch.
Or maybe I'm just an old guy who doesn't get it.
