2do, my task manager, is a good example. It displays badges showing # of tasks for the day. But since it can't run in the background, I have to open it each day to get the new day's total to appear.
Ahhh. Finally a non-Pandora, non-fringe example. That's a really good one. It had never occurred to me before now that a third-party app can't throw up a scheduled notification, because I personally use the built-in calendar for that. But that's a very good example.
Except that's not really "multitasking," is it? That's more like your app schedules a task to be run at a specific time, or after a specific interval, then hands that task off to the operating system. The app stops running until that task is scheduled to run, then the OS fires it off. In the meantime, your process is not actually running, which guarantees that it's not sucking up resources like RAM or power.
I agree, that would be a really cool feature to have in the iPhone OS assuming it's not there already; I'm just assuming it isn't. But it would be a really lousy idea to get to that feature by implementing this "run a bunch of crap in the background" idea that keeps getting floated around.
Then there are the apps with passcodes - for me, that's 2do, air sharing, and msecure. Let's say I'm looking at a doc in air sharing and want to check it against an email in mail. It's annoying that I have to put in the passcodes again when I go back to air sharing.
Badly designed app is badly designed. Why do individual apps need passwords? The phone itself can have a password, at the owner's discretion.
tho on the ipad, I do think it's essential, if only because of iWork. You can't effectively use a word processor without multitaskng.
I couldn't disagree more. I haven't used iWork on an iPad, so I can't speak to how it
will work. But if it near-instantly saves state whenever you press the home button, and near-instantly restores state when you touch the app icon, then you'll never notice that it's not running.
This is the thing I think most people are totally not getting about "multitasking." An app that's running in the background is
doing something. If I'm working in my suite (as I will be as soon as my clients get here, the lazy bums) and I kick off a render, I can switch to another application. After Effects or Final Cut or Smoke continues to render in the background; it's
doing something.
But if I were writing something in Pages and I switched to another application, Pages wouldn't be doing anything in the background. At least not anything that it actually needs to be doing. It might tick over periodically to make sure there's no input waiting for it or something, but that's just wasting electricity really.
If and this is a crucial "if" on your iPad switching apps via the home button is near-instantaneous, then there's absolutely no virtue in keeping an app like Pages running in the background. To the contrary, it's just a waste of memory and battery power to do so.
That's what I was talking about when I said we need to reach a consensus about what "multitasking" means. So far it means actually running more than one app at a time (the Pandora case), quickly switching between apps (your Pages case), and asynchronous scheduled events (your to-do case). These are three totally different things. Lumping them all under the blanket term "multitasking" and then proposing a really lousy solution to cover all three isn't going to get anybody anywhere.
