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Multitasking In For iPhone 4.0?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the could-it-be dept.

The latest word on the iPhone is that the 4.0 OS will finally have honest-to-goodness multitasking. This could hopefully lead to things like a real chat client, and dangerous battery consumption. I still hope it's true.

5 of 345 comments (clear)

  1. A minor point... by slagheap · · Score: 5, Informative

    The iPhone OS has always had real pre-emptive multitasking. The phone, email, iPod, calendar, and other applications run all the time and can do things simultaneously.

    Multitasking just hasn't ever been made available to 3rd party developers.

    It has never been a technical limitation in the OS. Rather, Apple kept control over it for battery life and security reasons.

    --
    First against the wall when the revolution comes
    1. Re:A minor point... by strength_of_10_men · · Score: 4, Informative

      The (jailbroken) app "Backgrounder" handles it quite well. It displays a small activity-wheel icon on apps that are currently running in the background. It also does this for the native Apple apps that run in the background. What's so hard about that?

    2. Re:A minor point... by zullnero · · Score: 4, Informative

      Actually, if you have a halfways intelligent notification system, that's not a problem at all. My Palm Pre does all that multitasking, and I've never had a phone call interrupted by anything. We've got over 2k apps now for the Pre in about 8-9 months, and I've got a lot of apps running on my phone, and I've never had a phone call interrupted by any app. We get notifications that show up as a little icon on the bottom of the screen, so when the phone call is done, I tap it and deal with it then. Or, I can choose to deal with it during the call if I so choose. In fact, I frequently open up my email while in a call on my Pre, because people call me all the freaking time and ask me if I got that email they sent. Or my calendar. Once, I opened up solitaire during a long conference call and had the call on speaker.

  2. Re:It's already been there by whisper_jeff · · Score: 4, Informative

    For some time now, I have been able to listen to music and browse the web, text, chat, etc. by just switching apps.

    Uh, you do know you can do that with a non-jailbroken iPhone, right? You didn't mention anything that a stock iPhone is incapable of doing so, if that's why you jailbroke your iPhone, you wasted your time... If there are other apps that you're running with backgrounder, fine, but that was a bad list of example tasks given the iPhone can do that out of the gate.

  3. Re:ipad might be worthwile by uberjack · · Score: 5, Informative

    As a dedicated Android user (and programmer), I still don't see the value of multitasking in a mobile app. The runtime can automatically clean up and restart the application with all the state information necessary if it ceases to run anyway. It's a lot easier to just assume that it's _always_ going to be cleaned up upon suspension, instead of writing code that accounts for the possibility that the app just may be resuming from a paused, but not terminated state. I haven't used a single Android app, or written any code that I can say honestly benefits from the multitasking aspects of Android. The runtime can shut down my app any time it sees fit. Planning for resumption from an abruptly terminated app is the norm when developing for Android anyway. The way I see it, the apps would have more resources if the platform didn't have to multitask.