iPhone OS 4.0
April 8th, 2010, 4:55pm by Mike
For the second time in a week, Apple has let me down a little. First it was the iPad (which I’m kinda sick of talking about), now iPhone OS 4.0. I’m a big fan of the iPhone, and I’m glad for Apple that they included some of what they did (they had to in order to stay relevant in today’s market), but I didn’t see anything that made me eager for 4.0, compared with a jailbroken 3.1.2. Rather than run through all the things they announced, here are my quick thoughts on some of what they announced:
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Multitasking: They had to put this in, and quick. I haven’t seen videos, and it’s a little hard to tell from Engadget’s live blog, but it looks like it’s an OK implementation. Not exciting (looks like all you see is the icon of what’s running, compared, for example, to the Pre, where you see a miniaturized, live version of the app). It looks like this (the apps in the dock-like part are the running apps).
An interesting quote from Steve Jobs during the Q&A, related to the thinking behind UI design at Apple:
Q: How do you close applications when multitasking?
A: (Scott) You don’t have to. The user just uses things and doesn’t ever have to worry about it.
(Steve) It’s like we said on the iPad, if you see a stylus, they blew it. In multitasking, if you see a task manager… they blew it. Users shouldn’t ever have to think about it.I think that Apple is usually right when they want to hide details from common user, but it’s on things like this that I wish they had an “advanced user” switch, where you could see the guts (like Terminal in OS X). What if you have an app hang? How many apps can run at once? If not infinite, how is it decided which apps get closed?
As for the APIs themselves, the background location is pretty nice for nav systems, and VOIP backgrounding brings VOIP up to the level of cell network phone calling (which is already backgroundable), but not terribly exciting. I could swear that there was already a sort of “fast app switching” where the app state was saved before closing. Task completion sounds like a good idea — up/downloading big files can be started, then finished in the background.
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Mail: They announced multiple Exchange accounts and a unified inbox (for multiple email accounts), but I’m not excited about either of those, personally. I would love the “view by thread” option, and it may be the thing I’m most excited about.
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iAd: Nobody is going to be psyched about ads, no matter if the guy selling them is wearing a black mock turtleneck or not. I know this wasn’t an announcement for the general public (it was specifically a developer preview), but as a user anyway, I was a little insulted that loading my phone up with ads is a feature. It won’t take long before developers realize they can make more money with Apple-style ads than they can simply selling their apps: I predict app prices will drop, but all apps will be ad-laden. Not too excited about that future.
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Social network for games: not interested.
Other thoughts:
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It would be great if the VPN support included the SecurID system that my company uses.
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Some features (e.g., multitasking) won’t run on a 2-year old phone (has to be 3GS or newer), guess that’s the obsolescence limit these days.
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I HATE the 3D dock, as much as I hate it on Mac (where it’s disabled)
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What did you guys think?
April 8th, 2010 at 5:04 pm
One other thing: the multitasking thing is invoked by double-tapping the home button. But that already has a (user settable) function — on my phone, it calls up my favorites list on the phone app (which allows me to not have to have the phone app on my dock, or on my home screen, for that matter).
Hopefully this will at least be user-settable, and hopefully there will be another way to invoke the multitasking function.
April 8th, 2010 at 5:34 pm
So this is my understanding: the new system only presents the illusion of multitasking, centered around a save state/new recent app tray axis. Currently, some apps save state, some don’t. Now it looks like all will, and they will get stuck into the tray when you quit the app. If those apps happen to hook into one of the backgroundable API’s, those services will continue to run. Audio and VOIP are good ones for that. I’m a bit confused about the limits of local notifications considering apps aren’t really running in the background. I saw a screen shot with a TV guide app that was using a local notification to alert that a certain program was on. Was that just a notification that was scheduled while the app was actually in the foreground? If that’s the case, would such an app need to be launched by the user (to the foreground) every once in a while to refresh future notifications? As for the multitasking tray itself, Seems arbitrary to limit it to one row that scrolls left and right. The forground window slides up, to make room– it seems like it could just slide a little more when necessary.
Anyway, a lot of multitasking scenarios have been addressed with the changes in OS4, but as I posted before, I think making a task schedular would have been nice (background changer, RSS reader, etc).
April 10th, 2010 at 10:53 am
have you seen all the news about Apple banning unapproved devlopment tools? Seems aimed squarely at Adobe’s Flash-to-iTunes compiler. Fodder for the inevitable antitrust case should Apple survive the Android onslaught.
April 10th, 2010 at 4:42 pm
To tell the truth, I’ve heard it mentioned, but haven’t read anything about it. From what I understand, Adobe has some tool to cross-compile into Objective C/Cocoa to make iPhone apps, but Apple won’t allow it? Why not? How does that hurt Apple? Seems like they’d get more (crappy) apps on the App Store by allowing it, right?
April 10th, 2010 at 9:56 pm
Apple probably doesn’t want developers to be able to easily post apps across platforms. Gruber had his own take on it. Definitely bad for Adobe in the short run, we’ll see if it hurts Android/WinMo7/webOS/Symbian in the long run but keeping mobile devs stuck w/ Apple tools.