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iPhone 4 News Roundup
We have a slew of iPhone 4-related stories this morning, so I'm lumping them together for easier consumption/ignoring, depending on your personal feelings on the subject.
Here is a blog entry proclaiming that iOS 4 multitasking sucks and why. Here is a sketchy summary of privacy violations by Apple and AT&T — apparently they are reporting back jailbroken phones. Skunkpost has a story about the lines and sales of the new phone. But the big news of the morning is the reception problems that apparently only affect people who hold the phone in their left hands.
Possibly not for long though http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/24/iphone-4s-yellow-spot-issue-goes-away-with-a-bit-of-time/
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Apple is using a bonding agent called Organofunctional Silane Z-6011 to bond the layers of glass. Apparently, Apple (or more likely Foxconn) is shipping these products so quickly that the evaporation process is not complete. However, after one or two days of use, especially with the screen on, will complete the evaporation process and the yellow "blotches" will disappear. How do I know? I was involved in pitching Z-6011 to Apple.
No one is denying that it exists, its just that it could very well just be the bonding agent not drying yet.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Seriously, is anyone else getting tired of the daily Apple story on the iPhone?
I get it, it's tech that people like, but do we really need daily updates on it? This site tends to be a heavy linux advocate and there is a nice writeup of the EVO 4G on Ars today. Not a peep of that though, MORE APPLE!
Android supports full preemptive multitasking, thanks to it being built on Linux.
You do realize that you can't change reality, or the pain that you suffer from due to having bought an iPhone, by spreading outright lies about non-Apple devices and software, right?
Regardless of what you say or believe, Android will still support preemptive multitasking, while iOS does not.
iPhone has preemptive multitasking, too, it's just not fully exposed to applications.
However, a misbehaving application cannot prevent others from running, which was the case with true cooperative multitasking OSes, such as Win3.x.
The new iPhone actually does address a lot of the calling complaints.
If you read the engadget review, the metal external antenna really do improve signal and ( for them) eliminated dropped calls.
The speakers are supposed to be improved for hearing people, and the phone had two microphones now so it can do noise cancelation.
Basically, they did a lot of things to improve call quality.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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From the TechWorld iOS4 multitasking article in the summary:
Waiting for a YouTube video to buffer over a 3G connection? It won't go anywhere unless you're staring at the loading screen.
Honestly, doesn't this also happen by default with applications on other mobile OS'es like Android, unless the developer specifies otherwise in the app's code?
From what I understand about the Android application life cycle under normal circumstances, once an Activity (the app's presentation layer, what you interact with) is completely obscured, the application's host process becomes a "background" process. Meaning, the app's Activities aren't visible and there are no Services running, thereby making the app's host process one of the first processes to be killed off so to allocate resources. (Service example: a media player running in the background while you're actively using another app). For an app's host process to remain in an active state, the app must have a running Activity, Service or Broadcast Receiver. In my following the Android dev tutorials, I've seen that only the Activity is absolutely required - Services and Broadcast Receivers are added only when you need them for your app to fulfill it's intended purpose.
So, in the case of buffering the YouTube video, if I were writing an Android app to do just that, I'd have to have explicitly created a Service to keep buffering the video while I used another app. If I didn't create a Service to keep buffering when the app's Activity exited the active state, then my app would do just what the article says - the app does nothing until I explicitly return to the app.
Am I missing something?
The article complains that to enable multitasking, developers have to change code. Is that really a serious complaint or is the author complaining just to complain. Things don't automagically happen in everyday life. If multitasking were enabled by default then any and all apps that you open would run continuously in the background. That would use all the memory and the battery. And the phone would eventually crash as it ran out of resources. And how many apps actually to need to run in the background as opposed to merely suspending? Did the author not think about that?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Well, on Android all apps support multi-tasking out of the box. And it's not just because it's been there since v1. It's because the framework practically forces you into supporting the suspend/resume model of multi-tasking (though you have the option of "the real thing" if you want it). Android apps are built up out of activities, and each activity suspends its state to what is basically a small file when it leaves the screen and reads back from it when it comes back. To move between screens, you pass the OS another little bundle of data. It's quite an interesting system once you get used to it, though like most of Android it's optional.
From a developer's perspective, iOS is the platform to beat.
Median iOS developer income per app: $682 per year.
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