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IPhone OS 4.0 unveiled, adds multitasking, shipping this summer
- jasonlotito 17y agoThe multitasking is nice for people like me who complained, though I wonder how everyone who was defending the lack of multitasking as a good thing will take it that the iPhone/iPad is now losing this 'feature.'
- colinplamondon 17y agoThe problem with multitasking is that all the prior implementations on phones sucked- it's a miserable experience on Android. This actually looks like a good solution.
- steverb 17y agoAnd that's how people will defend it.
- Terretta 17y agoSo far, the live blogging is sounding as though certain types of things will use Apple code to run those types of things in the background (eg., audio streaming, answering events, etc.). Hopefully this isn't going to allow apps to just run any random equivalent of a tight loop of their own (memory chewing CPU and battery consuming) design. I'd also like a reverse chronology notification history that pops up from tapping on the click.
- enjo 17y agoWhich limits an entire class of applications. It's not multi-tasking, it's system services that multi-task for you. To even call it multi-tasking is a joke.
- metachor 17y agoWhat is a use case for multi-tasking on a phone that you want/need that could only be covered by full preemptive multi-tasking of third party apps?
- mortenjorck 17y agoSETI@iPhone.
- locopati 17y agoMultitasking on the Pre works pretty darn well
- nailer 17y agoYeah, having used iPhone and Android for a while, the Pre's implementation blows them both away.
- jasonlotito 17y agoWhich has nothing to do with what I said. I was referring to the people defending the lack of multitasking as a feature. They would always crop up. Indeed, I remember one person using that same argument: That other MT implementations sucked, Apple shouldn't/couldn't do it for the iPhone. The reality is, MT was a missing feature, and it took them till revision 4 to deliver it. It wasn't because MT isn't important. It's because they didn't know how to implement it. That's a fair reason. I didn't see people suggesting that, and they were right.
- Batsu 17y agoI've had no qualms about multitasking on my Hero. Switching between my browser and gchat is a matter of holding down the home key for 3 seconds and pressing on whichever icon I want to go to. Things that run in the background, such as uploads, leave a notification on the top when it's finished. What's so bad about that?
- colinplamondon 17y agoThe management side- I have to have a Task Killer app running in the background to kill off all the random apps that wind up going. The problem on Android, to me, is more of a failure in caring about UI than a failure of technology- which is also my problem with the platform as a whole.
- orangecat 17y agoI have to have a Task Killer app running in the background to kill off all the random apps that wind up going No, you don't. Just because an app shows up in a process list doesn't mean it's consuming resources. (Other than memory, and background processes are automatically killed as needed to free up RAM).
- nooneelse 17y agohttp://geekfor.me/faq/you-shouldnt-be-using-a-task-killer-with-android/ http://geekfor.me/faq/you-shouldnt-be-using-a-task-killer-wi...
- jpcx01 17y agoSeriously? Have you used a droid or a nexus one? Multitasking has been one of the killer features for me. Swap between the web browser, email, podcasting app and it never loses your spot. There's no going back once you really feel like you have a computer in your pocket. Really hoping iPhone 4 can replicate this experience.
- gamble 17y agoAbsolutely. There's a reason that task manager apps are popular downloads for every phone that offers multitasking. You won't see them on iPhone OS 4.0.
- rimantas 17y agohttp://www.engadget.com/2010/04/08/jobs-if-you-see-a-stylus-or-a-task-manager-they-blew-it/ http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/08/jobs-if-you-see-a-stylus-...
- orangecat 17y agoThere's a reason that task manager apps are popular downloads for every phone that offers multitasking. The reason is that intermediate users who know just enough to be dangerous think that they're necessary, when they aren't: http://droidtalk.net/should-i-install-a-task-managerkiller-on-my-android-device/ http://droidtalk.net/should-i-install-a-task-managerkiller-o...
- gamble 17y agoAndroid gives app developers enough rope to hang themselves, or at least waste the battery by constantly firing up the radio or GPS. I agree that you don't need a task manager to conserve memory, but there's no automatic solution for overactive apps except the automatic cleanup for long-running apps. Even the link you supplied admits it: "Is it really necessary to be notified about every new tweet or status update? Reduce the refresh times on your social networking applications and reduce the number of items you’re notified about. Reduce the number of widgets you have on your home-screen, instead replace them with program shortcuts, you’ll still have quick access to your most used programs without the constant battery drain caused by continuous data pull."
- rimantas 17y agoThere is "defending" and there is "understanding the limitations". Apple found a way around those limitations: to offer seven background services which iPhone can offer to your Apps. That kind of gives you multitasking and still leaves resources control to Apple's code in iPhone OS. Update — services offered: Background audio VOIP Background location Push notifications Local notifications (don't require the server) Task completion (e.g. Flickr's upload can continue in the background) Fast app switching (storing/restoring app's state)
- jasonlotito 17y ago"There is "defending" and there is "understanding the limitations"." I agree. I'm referring to the defenders. The people that were actively pointing to reasons why multitasking for the iPhone/iPad were bad for non-technical reasons (screen size, the UI, they didn't need it, etc.) There were lots. Every time multitasking was brought up, they would offer countless reasons why multitasking was bad. Which was all just a cheap way to defend it's lack of multitasking. Multitasking was never a bad idea. It was always a missing feature. Regardless of the reasons for it, it's clear that they've finally overcome the problems. Their inability to do so until now shouldn't have shielded them from criticism early on.
- tptacek 17y agoStrong disagree. Apple's implementation of background services looks more like a vindication of the defenders. They didn't simply get their act together and make apps run in the background; they set the bar significantly higher than that.
- jasonlotito 17y ago"Strong disagree. Apple's implementation of background services looks more like a vindication of the defenders." But it's not. And you can disagree, but you are wrong. The defenders I'm referring to were supporting not having multitasking; or, better said, were touting lack of multitasking as a feature. Their were other defenders who were for multitasking, but against doing it poorly. I'm referring to the former, not the later.
- gte910h 17y agoOh I still hope it's a per-app settable option like notifications are. It was never a feature, it was a choice to prolong battery life. We'll see if the other side of the tradeoff is worse or better on the whole once it is put in everyone's devices.
- DannoHung 17y agoWell, personally, I'm not convinced that the implementation is good yet. They haven't addressed how they've avoided battery life implications OR how to actually quit an app yet, so you've still got the potential of the Android multitasking problem in that the UI is unintuitive. Also, I already have double-home button mapped to bring up the iPod controls and go to search. I don't like that that'll be going away. Though I'm not surprised that the implementation they're going with is allowing apps to have smaller background services instead of full on multitasking. I'm gonna let them finish before saying whether it's the best multitasking phone of all time though.
- tvon 17y agoJobs was very specific in saying that they managed to add multitasking without sacrificing battery life or performance. I suspect that's where people would point. edit: That is if you believe the real reason was for performance. Personally I think it was half that, and half that they hadn't come up with a good way to present it to the user. edit 2: I think this sums it up exactly: "(...) in multitasking, if you see a task manager, they blew it" - Jobs in Q&A.
- jasonlotito 17y agoArs is doing a good job live blogging it. http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/iphone-os-4-special-event-cupertino-liveblog.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/iphone-os-4-specia...
- tocomment 17y agowill the 1G iphones get this? I don't see it mentioned.
- tvon 17y ago> for iPhone 3G and iPod touch 2nd generation, they will run "many things" > "but there are some thigns they will not run because hardware doesn't support them, like multitasking" (via Ars live blog) ...so the 1G phone would presumably be out as well.
- heed 17y agoIs there much difference in hardware between the 2g and 3g iphones?
- illumin8 17y agoFaster processor perhaps. They are both cursed with only 128MB of RAM.
- jodrellblank 17y ago3G, GPS, a speed boost and a change of shape are the main ones, I think.
- acgourley 17y agoNo, only 3GS edit: sorry Only 3GS gets multitasking, you probably were asking about other OS4 features. no idea.
- khelloworld 17y agoThis will be the third time I will be downloading the 2.2 GB SDK on my slow-*ss network in just the last seven days. First the 3.2 GM, then the 3.2 official version, and now 4 beta. Phew.
- rimantas 17y agoI must admit I really like the way they do it: they do not rush, don't push half baked solutions. It either works or it is not there. Look at the copy and paste: it was the laughing point, it took some time and now it is the best implementation there. Even more so with iPhone OS 4: multitasking, folders, unified inbox — looks like they just focused on what's important. Anyway, naysayers will always have Flash to cry about.
- oneplusone 17y agoPersonally I really dislike copy and paste on an iphone. It is really annoying to use and always comes up when you don't want it to.
- adamhowell 17y agoHave you ever tried it on an Android? I'll admit the popup coming up all the time was annoying at first. But once I saw the alternative -- which was unusable as far as I'm concerned -- I didn't mind it as much.
- jsz0 17y agoI've owned an Android phone since October and I have no clue how to copy & paste on it.
- volida 17y agowhat about uploading from the browser?
- jsz0 17y agoOne of the early slides says something about uploading in the background. Guessing this is probably Safari -- can't think of where else it would apply.
- nfg 17y agoApps like flickr.
- scootklein 17y agoyoutube
- wmblaettler 17y agoI'd also love to see uploading from browser, even if it only had access to photos.
- CoachRufus87 17y agoGdgt is also doing an excellent live-blog; no refresh required :) http://live.gdgt.com/2010/04/08/live-iphone-os-4-0-event-coverage/ http://live.gdgt.com/2010/04/08/live-iphone-os-4-0-event-cov...
- glymor 17y agoLooks like there's going to be a OmniGraffle for the iPhone (presumably not $49 like the iPad version). http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2010/04/iphone-os-4-0248-rm-eng.jpg http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2010/04/iphone...
- adamhowell 17y agoWow, "iAd" - Apple's new mobile advertising offering - is Apple's first foray into advertising, isn't it? Being able to keep the user in the app while showing them high-quality ads is a huge advantage. And most likely the source of the recent, supposed kerfuffles between Apple and Google executives.
- tvon 17y agoHe mentions a 60/40 split on ads, can anyone speak to how this compares to other services? (edit, the ads are basically mini-apps, apparently in HTML5)
- aditya 17y agoGoogle, the 800 lb gorilla in this space, keeps the split completely secret probably cuz it's not a percentage but a value that changes over time. Admob, the iPhone advertising platform that Google bought had the same split as iAd, 60/40 for CPC and 50/50 for CPM on banners. There are others that pay higher, more here: http://mobiforge.com/running/story/mobile-advertising-how-monetize-your-mobile-site http://mobiforge.com/running/story/mobile-advertising-how-mo...
- DannoHung 17y agoThese do look ridiculously sticky. Now if they can figure out how to target this stuff AND deliver high quality... damn.
- gr366 17y agoGiven that Apple knows a lot about people's buying history and demographics from the iTunes store (music, apps, etc.), I expect they're going to be able to target these ads pretty effectively. I predict you'll see Apple being pretty selective about which advertisers get into the iAds program — they want high quality brands that will be of real interest to users.
- jackowayed 17y agoFrom engadget's live blog: >Q: Will there be an ad approval process? A: (Jobs... super long pause) Um... well there's going to be some process... but these people are paying to run ads. So, I'm not sure it'll be anything other than a light touch. So that implies that they won't be too selective about the advertisers, though they might just charge enough to ensure that most advertisers are high quality.
- kalid 17y agoI think this is the right way to go about it... rather than giving apps whole-hog access where they can burn up cpu and memory at will, in a black box, Apple can do a "don't call us, we'll call you" type of API. Apple can monitor exactly what resources are being used, have timeouts for api calls, etc. to maintain perf. If you do regular multitasking (just split up cpu time between the top N apps) you have no idea how efficient apps are being, or why they are using cpu. You can't easily prioritize certain activities over others (i.e notifications vs. voip vs location). You can't optimize everyone's calls with core library functions (each app would re-implement their background tasks, perhaps poorly). When people say they need multitasking they really mean "streaming music/skype/background notifications", like when they say they want flash they really mean they want video. We have to be careful not to just give people the faster horse.
- weaksauce 17y agoYeah it's like polled IO vs interrupt driven IO. I am interested in this new paradigm for the iPhone os. I wonder what types of apps they are leaving out of the background multitasking? It seems like they have gotten most of the use cases down but when you limit it there usually is one glaring use case that was not thought of.
- kalid 17y agoYeah, the neat thing about Apple's strategy is that they've allowed 150k individual apps to flourish already. They can look at the APIs they provide and say "We handle 80/90/95% of the tasks needed by these apps". It's real-world customer development, based on actual requirements, vs. forecasting what people might want. There might be a missing use case, which will then appear in OS 4.1 next year :).
- ezy 17y agoWell, when I say "multitasking", I mean the ability to switch out of a network app without it disconnecting. I wonder how persistent network connections will be managed that aren't IM or streaming audio? One huge annoyance with the current platform is that remote desktop or ssh apps disconnect when you switch out of the app. It's one of the reasons i'm thinking of holding off on the iPad for another year (another OS release). Given Scott's comment about how there is no "close" in this pseudo-multitasking world, I'm a little worried that the iPad will stay useless for me for the foreseeable future :-)
- paulsmith 17y agoCan anyone explain the implementation of multitasking here, not the user experience of it? I'm hearing a combo of new service APIs and "freezing state." What does "freezing state" mean? That to me implies some sort of serialization out of and back into RAM, otherwise you'll run into out-of-memory problems opening new apps, but that would seem to indicate swap, which as we know would kill performance (and presumably battery life), both of which Apple claims multitasking won't do.
- wmf 17y agoIt's probably NDA'd like all beta SDKs, so we'll have to wait a day or so for the details to leak.
- paulsmith 17y agoPerhaps, but I'm just curious from a stepped-back perspective, given a very constrained environment (limited RAM, no swap device) and expectations for a responsive user experience, how one would go about implementing "frozen state" for a process without presumably swapping to (slow) flash storage. What technique is being employed? Compression of in-memory objects, perhaps?
- orangecat 17y agoWhat does "freezing state" mean? My impression is that the kernel just suspends the process and keeps it in RAM. I'd expect there to be a notification that the app gets before it's suspended so that it can free any memory that's not necessary for preserving its state.
- timtrueman 17y agoAlright good job Apple. Now when can I have Google Voice without jailbreaking?
- mcav 17y agoMy startup is about online games... the more Apple delves into this (GameKit), the more I feel pulled toward developing for the iPad vs the web. Any thoughts? Is the iPad filled with more potential than the web for casual card/board games?
- lyime 17y agoiPad is a great device to build for. Just remember that iPhone/Touch has tens of millions of users already. iPad by the end of the year will have probably a few million.
- mkinsella 17y agoGoogle's purchase of AdMob now looks like a great exit by AdMob and horrible purchase by Google
- timr 17y agoThat announcement had shades of Microsoft for me: "you want to compete with us? OK, we'll just re-create your only profitable product using our proprietary internal APIs. Our version will be more integrated, faster and better than yours, and you can't do a damn thing about it, because we own the platform." It's a bit of a stretch to say that AdMob was a "horrible" purchase, though. They had to do something to move into the space. The only question is whether the iPhone is dominant enough in the market to make Apple's strategy successful over the long term -- if Android takes over the mobile market, Apple will only have a monopoly on a niche ad network.
- rogupta 17y agoFCC still hasn't approved the purchase. I'm hard-pressed to see any anti-trust issues now, but imagine if it got blocked? It will be tough to compete with iAd.
- nolanbrown23 17y agoFTC, not FCC
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- Keyframe 17y ago"Steve: We tried to buy AdMob but Google came in and snatched them from us cuz they didn't want us to have them" All I can say is LOL! sorry. edit: forgot to say it's a quote I saw on arstechnica live coverage.
- philwelch 17y agoIf that's all you can say, you really don't have to post it here. We tend to value more useful comments than that.
- zppx 17y agoI read it will supports 'SSL VPN's' does anyone know if this will include openvpn support
- FlorinAndrei 17y agoThat would be awesome, but I'm afraid by "SSL VPN" they mean just the lame browser-based pseudo-VPN gateways.
- pclark 17y agoNo multi-tasking on 3G iPhones - 3GS only.
- bshep 17y agoThey say its because of hardware limitations but I smell a rat. I have a jailbroken 3G with 'MusicControls' and it allows me to background pandora just fine. This is just a way of forcing people to upgrade to the latest non-jailbreakable hardware.
- waterlesscloud 17y agono doubt the iPad has the same "hardware limitations"?
- tptacek 17y agoNo, the iPad gets multitasking in the Fall.
- tptacek 17y agoThey care about the end user experience. They don't care at all about what you've managed to get working on a jailbroken phone. My take is that they decided the experience wouldn't be good on the 3G. (They were emphatic about this point in Q&A). Either way, it's irrelevant. I didn't buy my 3G in the anticipation of having multitasking. I bought it because I wanted what it was then. I'm upgrade-eligible soon enough, and happy to have a reason to buy a 4th-gen iPhone.
- bshep 17y agoIt works perfectly, it even shows the artwork in the lockscreen just like the ipod app does, something I didnt see in Apple's version of multitasking. I also want a 4th Gen iPhone but not if its not jailbreak-able, there are too many missing features that can only be enabled by jailbreaking.
- 17y ago
- pkulak 17y agoSo, does this mean that an IM app could now run in the background instead of using push notifications? It's not really clear that "local notifications" means that an app can keep a connection open.
- pwmanagerdied 17y agoI was thinking about this and remembered the "task completion" service. Their example is Flickr uploading, which is keeping a connection open for an indefinite amount of time, so it seems likely that IM clients would manage.
- gamble 17y agoiAd is the ultimate FU to Google. The cheap way to pay them back for Android would have been to banish Google from the iPhone. Instead, they're attempting to transform mobile advertising into something where Google's technical strengths are worthless, while their weaknesses - user interfaces, platform fragmentation, and apps - are a serious liability. Worse, Apple is right - mobile ads do suck. Nobody clicks on them, because launching a web browser from an app is incredibly disruptive on a handheld. This is an 'aha' moment akin to when Google launched adwords. If iAd is easy to develop for and deployed across millions of devices, Google's ambitions for mobile are in serious trouble.
- tortilla 17y agoExactly. This is a fucking big deal :)
- mattmaroon 17y agoBeing a Facebook developer I've pretty much ignored the iPhone up until now because of the distribution problems. This makes it tempting.
- mattmaroon 17y agoWell, launching a web browser from an app is a lot less disruptive when you have multitasking. This will be big because game makers will buy these by the boatload. I'll go on record right now predicting game ads will be over 80% of what you see on these.
- metachor 17y agoIf game makers take up this approach in force, that will be a fair sight better than the status quo of supporting "free" games by way of in-app purchases (that are essentially mandatory to get the full experience of the game).
- mattmaroon 17y agoI know some game makers, and I'm pretty sure none of them like the current paradigm much either. It's a pain in the ass. Because of the horrendous distribution system, to succeed on the iPhone you have to be constantly gaming the app store, and every hour you spend doing that is an hour you didn't spend making your game better. This is why we've never touched it. On Facebook, we just have to make our users want to invite other users. We don't have to constantly release new versions and incentivize users to download them just to get ourselves back in the top 20. There are some tricks, of course, but they're less of a detour from the desired path, if that makes sense. iAds will make success on the platform a numbers game. Every free app will run it because it can't pay worse than the current options, even with the 40% rake. Paid apps will break out the spreadsheet and almost certainly find a CPA below the app's price for a paid one. My totally off-the-cuff guess is that with a really engaging iAd you'll end up paying $1 to sell a $2 app, at which point it's all about volume. Selling a million like that might be doable, and now we're talking money in line with what Facebook apps can make. Still, the problem will be that the most successful iPhone apps make about the same amount lifetime that the most successful Facebook apps make in a month. But the odds of succeeding may now be high enough to make it a worthwhile play.
- ja27 17y agoAny mention of pricing for the iPod Touch update?
- pchristensen 17y agoAll previous one have been $10.
- mattmaroon 17y agoThose of you who have iPhones will truly love this. I know after having a Palm Pre for just one week I realized I could never go back to single tasking. You'll find yourself walking around, listening to Pandora, mapping what's around you, checking out reviews of it on Yelp, etc. Or sitting in a coffee shop, Googling something else, answering a call, emailing, etc. It will be rare that you're not running two things.
- lygaret 17y agoWait a second. Other than pandora, which I agree will be awesome in the background, what in that use case requires multitasking? Open Maps, see a place, click the link to switch to Safari to see it's website, check reviews in yelp. Nowhere is more than one thing happening here. Ditto with googling something, answering the phone, switching to email, switching back to Safari. Everything here is saving state so when you launch it it comes back to where it was. THIS is what people mean when they say that 90% of use cases are covered currently. The background services are great for pandora, etc. but let's not make them out to be more than they are.
- yellowbkpk 17y agoOk, I'll take a stab at it: foursquare app open to auto-checkin (or a Waze/OpenStreetMap editor recording GPS traces), IM app open to receive Skype calls, SSH connection open for quick access to top on your new widget-server. I admit that none of those things need to be running simultaneously, but the fact that they are running is pretty nice.
- jodrellblank 17y agoThose of you who have iPhones and haven't jailbroken them and installed Backgrounder from Cydia.
- jsz0 17y agoOne of the interesting features is background audio seems to use the iPod application for its playback controls. Presumably this means third party apps will be compatible with iPod integration systems in cars, home audio systems, etc. That's a big deal if true.
- nickpp 17y agoNo new iPhone hardware this year? I thought they were gonna announce a 4th generation handset.
- tptacek 17y agoNot at this event.
- kadavy 17y agoWhat's up with the disconnect between news like this and Wall Street? iAd is announced, AAPL goes down and GOOG goes up?
- cstejerean 17y agoIf AAPL goes down after the announcement, go ahead and buy before everyone else figures out what this means.
- wallflower 17y agobuy on the hype, sell on the news
- elblanco 17y agoWell that's better. Wait, multitasking? I thought we've just been having the discussion about how Apple is awesome for not having multitasking followed by a long bulleted list of apologists talking points?
- blubb 17y agoDon't worry, there's still plenty of features that most people don't care about that techies can have mile long threads about. - You can't change the battery - It doesn't support 3D glasses and 4K cinema resolution - No 20MP camera with flash and replacable lens - There is no noticeable lag when running applications in the background, so it's actually not "true multitasking". You can't run 100 apps in the background. - Can't install apps without jailbreak (or dev license) - Doesn't have a nanoSD card - No USB port
- jodrellblank 17y agoYou thought that, but we weren't. We were having the discussion "plausible reasons why Apple might not have implemented multitasking yet, and a pragmatic understanding and acceptance based on the wonderful nature of the iPhone anyway and hope for future multitasking done in a way that wont ruin that".
- jrockway 17y agoLooks like Apple is finally catching up to Android.
- khelloworld 17y agoI can smell a new iPad OS (or at least a new variant of iPhone OS) coming this fall.
- spudlyo 17y agoNice to finally have bluetooth keyboard support. I could never bring myself to use my iPhone as an SSH terminal because typing UNIX commands using the onscreen keyboard drove me crazy. I think landscape 80x24 on the iPhone would even look pretty decent. I've always been disappointed in iPhone bluetooth support. When we finally got A2DP they only implemented a half-assed AVRCP profile so we couldn't skip tracks with our A2DP headsets. Frustrating. Hopefully version 4.0 of the iPhone OS finally implements this, but I've yet to see confirmation.
- snprbob86 17y agoMaybe I'm biased (I work at Microsoft on gaming), but I'm shocked that this thread is all about multitasking and not about the social gaming network! Apple has sold 50M iPhones. Microsoft has sold roughly 30M Xbox 360s. This summer, before the launch of Windows Phone 7, Apple will have the world's largest gaming network.....overnight. How is that not a bigger deal than multi-tasking?
- gamble 17y agoToo many announcements. =) I agree - the gaming network will be a big deal, especially since it will provide an alternative channel for developers to market their games. It gives the iPhone the social marketing aspect of Facebook games.
- DannoHung 17y agoI am also excited about this. I hope one of those APIs is to bluetooth enabled human interface devices or something so I can stick a joystick on my iPad.
- santry 17y agoWhat percentage of people play social games on the iPhone? I know anecdotes aren't data, but I've had an iPhone since day 1 and have never bought or played a game on it.
- modeless 17y agoConsidering that games are the most popular form of application in the app store (currently 9/10 top grossing and 6/10 top free apps are games), I think the percentage is quite high. With an XBox Live-like framework for achievements and friend leaderboards even single-player games can be social.
- ericd 17y agoMy iPhone has completely supplanted my Nintendo DS for subway entertainment. Based on what I've seen on the subway, it's by far the most popular portable gaming platform, at least in NYC.
- chwahoo 17y agoI think Apple has been on a streak of releasing some great products, but I'm growing weary of Apple condescendingly telling people what they don't need (such as multitasking and copy/paste) and then turning around and touting those features as innovations later. (I don't mean to imply that the new multitasking services approach is not a good solution - I think that it is). Now, we shouldn't need a stylus or task manager: http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/08/jobs-if-you-see-a-stylus-or-a-task-manager-they-blew-it/ http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/08/jobs-if-you-see-a-stylus-... The problem is, I want a stylus on something like the iPad - for some operations, writing is a more familiar metaphor than finger-painting. Likewise, their app-switcher is 90% of a task manager - all they'd need to do is add closing background apps (a feature we don't need?). I know Apple is the master of opinionated design / "not listening to the customer" in order to provide something better than what the customer thinks they want. However, as a technical user, sometimes they outsmart me and sometimes they fail. In the next year, I'll purchase a tablet device (most likely Android-based, maybe the Notion Ink Adam... if it lives up to its hype). I don't expect for it to be as elegant as an Apple product, but it will do more of the things I want (and not insult me).
- glhaynes 17y agoNothing prevents you from using a 3rd party stylus (such as the Pogo stylus, which is pretty sweet) on your iPhone/iPad. In fact, I think they sell them at their retail stores. But they're not gonna ship a device with a stylus and neither will most of their competitors. Likewise, they never said users didn't need copy/paste, they just shipped the first few versions of iPhone OS without it while they were still working on it.
- chwahoo 17y agore: the stylus, I absolutely agree that a 3rd party stylus will do the job, I was commenting on the suggestion that stylus-based interaction is necessarily a symptom of bad interaction design. In fact, although it is not fashionable, inclusion of a stylus with a tablet device would be a positive for me. (Note: I'm not advocating the old WinMo finger-unfriendly UI model)
- daleharvey 17y ago"Apps that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation ... layer or tool are prohibited." in the new license agreement, did they just ban apps generated by flash cs5?
- theBobMcCormick 17y agoWait! I thought the lack of multitasking on the iPhone was a feature? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1240171 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1240171
- yters 17y agoArgh, make the Apple fanmactics stop!
- lazugod 17y agoWill iAd be allowed to use the iPhone's location data for targeting advertisements? I remember they specifically asked third-party ad servers to not do so.
- rogermugs 17y agoquestion: I'm unclear from apple's website and this engadget article. It seems from apple's website that OS4 isn't available at all for first gen iphones. is that true? or just the multitasking... i love my first gen and wont upgrade unless I have to but I cant figure clearly. Engadget seems to say the upgrade works for first gen, just doesn't include multitasking.
- Psyonic 17y agoThe thing thats funny about this is that all the apologists who've been explaining why multitasking is pointless and unnecessary will now instantly switch positions and say this makes Apple the greatest company ever.