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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.
At least almost certainly.
MuscleNerd, one of the, if not THE foremost Apple device hacker out there has implied he has done code inspection and just through common sense says its all BS.
There are a few tweets on the matter but this is one of the more telling:
http://twitter.com/MuscleNerd/status/16876551921
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
I would be curious about the conductivity of certain coatings. I personally hate covers for phones, as they add bulk. As a person with nickel allergies, I have to coat belt buckles and the like with acrylic. I wonder if the same would help this antenna. If so, then they could do something similar in the manufacturing process. They do similar coatings for fishing rods that weather well.
You want my advice? Don't buy an iPhone. Or any number of the other phones that don't offer developer access for users.
I remember my first Sprint phone, which had a four-note polyphonic midi player built-in, and I was so excited, I started to make my own midi files, but couldn't figure out how to import them. I called their support and they said that it was impossible, that this was special encoded data and all ring tones had to be purchased.
I called BS on it, and told them that it was all bits, and I should be able to do what I wanted. The support monkey said no.
A few weeks later, someone leaked the information; turns out you just needed a special HTTP header line to tell the phone that it was a Sprint-sanctioned ring tone, and it would download fine. Once it was published, I wrote a script to allow me to upload a MIDI file to my web site, which would then send a text message with the right URL to access it to my phone, and I would download it. It was awesome.
A month later, Sprint came out with phones that allowed the user to edit midi files right on the phone itself.
I guess I'm getting old. I'm sure there was a point in there somewhere. Maybe it's that all of the cell phone vendors and service providers have their own control issues. If you don't like it, as you say, vote with your wallet.
The CB App. What's your 20?
From other platforms, we know that is not a major battery drain, and it's perfectly possible for a scheduler to do automatically whatever Apple's special APIs are trying to achieve.
Um, even Google acknowledges that multitasking hurts battery life. As a geek, that's an acceptable tradeoff because you know about it. For the average consumer that can barely distinguish the difference between Li-Poly and Lipitor, all they'll know is that the battery life on their iPhone sucks and Apple is totally to blame.
With multitasking, you could run local file servers and local web servers. You could create new applications delivery platforms, local music servers, and a local file system and file manager.
With the iPhone, Apple succeeded in selling a smartphone to consumers by hiding all the complexities of a smartphone like the filesystem and a file manager. And you want to undo all of that? Maybe perhaps Apple didn't design the iPhone for geeks like you.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I posted this as a comment on the multi-tasking article, but I'll restate it here with a little more verbosity.
Ever since I've had an iPhone, I've wondered what the obsession is with multitasking. I couldn't really think of any two *productive* things to do simultaneously on a phone. On a PC (by that I mean a desktop, laptop, netbook), I can appreciate the need to go do some other design work while you render a huge video, or burn a DVD, or OCR a huge document. On a phone, I can't, off-hand, think of much CPU-intensive stuff that can run for an extended time without needing to stop for user input. Because of that, productivity is lost because you're having to stop and switch apps all the time. The meaning of "EMACS" is true. Editors Make All Computers Slow. If the device is waiting for user input, then its speed (or multitasking ability) is moot.
Wanting to Pandora to keep streaming while you tweet is *not* a productivity enhancer; it's merely letting you be a little more streamlined about wasting your time (kinda like texting while you watch TV). Now, I know I'm sounding like an old "all work, no play" curmudgeon about this (and get off my lawn, too!). Don't get me wrong. I agree that being able to keep Pandora going while I do other stuff is a nicety, but I don't think that something like that is such a "must have" thing that it warrants all of the articles and posts we've seen demanding that Apple make significant changes to the OS and its API in order to make it possible. I'd never once make the argument that the iPhone OS has some glaring hole in its functionality because I can't listen to music while I'm sending a text.
Yet, Apple caved and gave it to us anyway. So now, the dude who wrote the article is mad because he can't go do something else while a YouTube video loads. Breaking story: If you're visiting YouTube, you've already decided that your time isn't valuable. I read another article where a guy was mad because he couldn't go switch to something else in the 5-6 seconds while a page loads in Safari (probably while he's driving, too).
My position on full background-execution multitasking remains unchanged from the first time I tried a Windows Mobile phone after being a Palm user for years. With a small device like a phone, it's just too easy for a user to rack up this huge array of crap running in the background without realizing it. And that, potentially, has a greater impact on your productivity since it will gobble up the power in your battery. With a PC, you've got a task bar or a dock to see what you've got running. In addition, there's a one-click way of shutting off the app. Whenever a Windows Mobile user would have me look at their phone to fix it, I'd find that they had a half-dozen things still running: control panel, mail, notepad, contacts... all of these things were things where they had finished their work with those apps, but they either didn't realize that they had to close the apps or they were too lazy to press "Menu->File->Quit". Instead, they just went back to the home screen and started the next app they wanted.
Personally, I think that Apple's compromise is a good one. If your app doesn't have a compelling reason to keep executing (like streaming audio, getting GPS updates for navigation, etc.), then the most your app really needs is just to have its state saved for quick re-launch.
iPhone 4, can NOT Upload 720p Videos to youtube direct from phone! What a Shame see http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=10309456
The default behavior of iPhone apps is that they get suspended them when you are not in the foreground with the exception of the push notifications and phone services. What the author was complaining about was that in order to use any of the advanced multitasking options, developers have change code that tells iOS that the app should have a different behavior than the default. Is that really a serious complaint?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
You can make statistics say whatever you want. 90% of the apps in the app store are trash, and I can say that as a happy iPhone owner. The guys who are putting major time into creating good apps are actually making money. How many fscking flashlight apps do the numbers from that article include? How many fart apps? Just saying.
It's just not a well-designed feature.
I disagree, I think it's simple and elegant. A stack with the most recently run app always moving to the top (left) makes sense to me and I've found switching between the handful of apps I'm using during any given period really efficient. Any app I'm not actively switching back to naturally falls away as recently viewed apps move in front of it.
If you don't delete them manually, eventually all your apps are going to appear there, and what the hell is the use of that?
It really doesn't matter how deep the stack goes (though I assume there is some arbitrary limit). It's not as if they add any visual clutter since you have to actively scroll to see them and as mentioned above, if you didn't use an app recently the natural thing to do is to use it's icon on the home page. It's only confusing if you think you have to manually manage each app's state. But the whole point behind Apple's limited multi-tasking and UI is that the end user should not have to manage an app's state.
There needs to be a way of quitting apps without adding them to the bar.
And there is the rub. You don't typically "quit" an iOS app, you switch away from it. Whether the app actually exits or not is determined by the app and iOS. You can choose to force the app to exit, but there is rarely any need (so far the only reason I've forced an app to close was to see how that changed it's behavior next time I switched to it.)
Some privacy policy Slashdot.