All Articles Tagged multitasking

Friday we linked to Business Insider and Daring Fireball both quoting sources that claimed Apple was considering allowing some form of limited background multi-tasking on the iPhone at some point in the future. Now TechCrunch is weighing in, having heard a similar rumor from its sources:

while this is in no way a done deal yet, Apple is definitely trying to come up with a way to offer background support for third-party apps. They went on to note that while Apple may have something to say about it at WWDC, it’s very unlikely that any solution would be ready at that time, and could be a situation similar to how Apple announced Push Notification at WWDC last year but said it was coming in a few months (which it later was delayed until iPhone 3.0).

TechCrunch cites processor power, user experience, and battery life as factors currently concerning Apple. They also suggest the soon-to-be released Palm Pre, with its webOS multi-tasking as a driving force behind all chatter we’ve been hearing about it all of a sudden.

Business Insider rumormongers that Apple might be considering some limited form of multi-tasking, perhaps as early as iPhone 3.0, which would allow 3rd party apps to run as background tasks. They point to two possible models:

1. Apple might allow users to select two apps that can run in the background.
2. Apple might selectively allow some apps to run in the background. We assume that developers could apply for permission to run in the background, and that Apple might approve or deny them based on the resources they need and how well they behave with the operating system’s stability.

Daring Fireball steps up to throw a combo of water and fuel on that particular fire:

I heard something very similar from a decent (but second-hand) source back in January during Macworld Expo. What I heard then was that Apple was working on a vastly improved dock for your most-frequently used apps, and that there’d be one special icon position where you could put a third-party app to enable it to run in the background.

Gruber also rightly points out that the iPhone 3G’s 128MB of RAM is likely the constraining factor to current generation multitasking and that won’t change with the iPhone 3.0 firmware. If reports of at least 512MB of RAM in a 3rd generation iPhone are to be believed, however, this could be a much more compelling and powerful feature.

A dock that slides up like a slot-limited version of Google’s Android app shelf maybe? And one that grants background permission to anything placed inside it? Yes please.

Our sibling site PreCentral.net has gotten their mobile accomplishers on yet another (rumored to be) leaked internal document. This one supposedly comes from Sprint and details what, to PreCentral.net, are some interesting factoids. To us, however, they represent some far more interesting questions:

• The picture above shows what looks to be fairly user-toxic troubleshooting steps for Pre and memory management. While the iPhone has memory issues as well, you either reboot or restore. Here, steps are approaching the level of finicky task management and triage Apple has made fun of in previous iPhone keynotes.
• Tethering looks to be gone, which may be a bad sign for iPhone users hoping AT&T would throw it in when OS 3.0 — which enables it — rolls around this summer.
• Also, no cut and paste from web pages, which is interesting given that webOS is based on web 2.0 style pages. Shouldn’t that one be a gimme?

For much, much more, check out the source blog and let us know how the Palm Pre is developing, competitively to the iPhone, from your point of view. (Of course, we won’t know any final feature set or functionality levels until it actually ships… sometime before June 30).

We’ve asked whatever happened to the iPhone’s Push-Notification Service quite a bit recently, even secretly hoped they may find it too difficult and just start to allow some “favored nation” background multitasking…

Now MacRumors is rumoring that that is exactly what might be happening in a future firmware:

While we aren’t sure what the specific issues are, we’ve heard that as an alternative Apple is considering allowing apps to run as user selectable background processes. If so, this feature would likely come in the rumored iPhone 3.0 software update but would be limited to only one or two processes on current hardware. The next generation iPhone, however, would likely see less restricted background process support due to its improved hardware.

So how does that work for you, fellow TiPbsters? Better than Push notification? Worse? And is a few user-selectable apps enough? If the next gen iPhone allows more multitasking, is that a compelling reason to upgrade in and of itself?

There seems to be some confusion out there about the iPhone and multitasking, no doubt fueled by the way Apple handled — and is still handling — all things iPhone. Just to be clear, the iPhone multitasks quite well, thank you very much.

While listening to music, you can receive a phone call, take the call, jump into Safari, Google for an image, save the image to your camera roll, jump into Photos, choose the image, hit the “+” and choose to email the image, fill in and send the email, etc. and when the call is over, your music will fade seamlessly back in.

Steve Jobs showed a simpler version of that when he first introduced the iPhone back at Macworld 2007. Even today, you can begin a new iTunes 3G music download, jump into a Twitter app, tweet a response, and jump back to iTunes and see your download still progressing.

So from where does this confusion come?

Read the rest of this entry »

The iPhone SDK will not allow 3rd party apps to multitask or run background services. We’ve previously covered both initial developer Twitter-rage at this, and pundit counter-points. We’ve also covered Craig Hockenberry before — the man who (perhaps poetically) develops Twitterrific for the Mac and jailbroken iPhones, and is now bringing it to the SDK.

Hockenberry, via his furbo.org blog, shares his experience on iPhone development and his views on the multitasking (non-?) issue.

To be blunt, I’ve never seen so many experts without a fricken’ clue. If you haven’t written code using the jailbreak tool chain, your opinions on the iPhone SDK, based entirely on what you see in a simulator, just aren’t relevant. You might as well be explaining the nuances of brain surgery.

Wha-wha-wha-what? Please, allow Mr. Hockenberry to continue:

Twitterrific on the iPhone could definitely make use of a background process to gather new tweets. In fact, a prototype version of the software did just that. And it was a huge design failure: after doing XML queries every 5 minutes, the phone’s battery was almost dead after 4 hours. In fact, the first thing I said after giving Gruber this test version was “don’t use auto-refresh.”

Hockenberry goes on to discuss the power demand problem of the radios, both EDGE and Wi-Fi, and the danger of even well-intentioned developers getting individually reasonable but collectively overwhelming access to background services. He does, however, expect that in a future release Apple may include some method of notifying network apps that the radios are being used (for example, by MobileMail Touch), and allowing brief TCP/IP connections during that period. Bottom-line, at the OS’s discretion, not the individual apps’.

Sound reasonable? Sound crazy? Should Apple give unfettered access to everyone immediately an trust users to sort through it themselves? Or should Apple be as strict as possible from the get-go? What do you think?

Developers want them their multitasking. They want them popping up, one after the other, like Agent Smith replicants in the Matrix sequels. What? Viruses incarnate from poorly conceived follow-up movies is a bad analogy?

Not according to some leading Apple pundits.

Witness Daniel Eran Dilger’s iPhone 2.0 SDK: The No Multitasking Myth from Roughly Drafted Magazine:

By limiting the amount of background processes running, the iPhone’s OS X can offer more of that available RAM to the foreground application, along with a less distracted processor. The iPhone is not a general purpose computer; it is primarily a phone, browser, and iPod. Due to the restrictions imposed by the SDK, it will also be a credible gaming platform and pack the power to run significant productivity applications, all without giving up the ability to be a responsive phone, browser, and iPod. Other devices can’t make that claim.

Sure, Dilger is sometimes considered on the extreme-end of Mac’tivism. Let’s see what Daring Fireball’s John Gruber has to say when he takes on One App at a Time:

Why has Apple imposed this limitation? Easy: the iPhone is severely resource constrained. Battery, RAM, and CPU cycles are all severely limited. If third-party apps could run in the background, all three could suffer. RAM would suffer for sure; all running apps consume memory. The iPhone has just 128 MB of RAM, and no swap space. CPU performance and battery life would suffer when background apps do something — and if they’re not doing anything, what’s the point of keeping them running? I noticed a significant increase in battery life after I switched the Mail app’s auto-checking interval from 15 minutes to 60 minutes. That’s just one app.

Okay, but they’re not developers. They don’t understand the needs, the passion. But then developers aren’t pure consumers either and developers don’t always understand consumer needs. Sometimes developers are so busy with the abstract coolness of what they can do, they don’t always stop and consider the colder reality of whether they should.

For every OS-changing Switcher app, there are dozens of buggy, crash-inducing WinMob and Palm fetishware. (As I can personally attest to, when even major apps from major developers rendered my Treo unusable).

No developer goes out there with ill-intent (malware aside), but their concern is app-level, not device or OS level. That’s where Apple comes in. The overall user experience isn’t the developers concern, nor should it be. It’s Apple’s concern, and right now Apple is imposing that concern via no-multitasking guidelines.

Note: John Gruber, quoting Hank Williams, also gives us The Flip Side of the Multitasking Argument. (Hit up the Roughly Drafted link above for some excellent back-and-forth between Williams and Dilger in the comment section as well.)

UPDATE: Gruber follows up in Foot, Meet Bullet, a point-counterpoint with Ian Betteridge.

What do you think? Is the ban on multitasking good or bad for the general user-base (i.e., our moms!)? For power users? Will Apple make exceptions for certain big developers (like AOL for AIM)? Will they relax the policy after the initial development rush is over, the space shakes out, and only cooler, more seasoned and reasoned heads remain in the game? Will some crafty devs will figure ways around the rules? (creativity thrives under constraint!). Or will things just stay the way they are?

John Gruber skims through the iPhone updated HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) and reveals the following:

Only one iPhone application can run at a time, and third-party applications never run in the background. This means that when users switch to another application, answer the phone, or check their email, the application they were using quits. It’s important to make sure that users do not experience any negative effects because of this reality. In other words, users should not feel that leaving your iPhone application and returning to it later is any more difficult than switching among applications on a computer.

Will there be a function to preserve state between App uses? (The way iTunes remembers what song you were playing and where you were in that song) Or will each App have to load fresh each time? (The way photos gives you the album chooser, rather than the last photo/state screen upon launch).

Treo users have been stymied for years by lack of true preemptive multitasking, while Windows Mobile has been criticized for letting Apps pile up like splattered bugs on an speeding windshield. But functionality like background music playing, downloads, data (i.e. email checking now that it’s push) seem like no-brain must have’ems. What’s the deal Apple? And what do you think?