“Back in June at the WWDC keynote, Apple SVP of iPhone software Scott Forstall took the stage to discuss Apple’s answer to the lack of background applications on the iPhone. Many developers had expressed concern about the limitation which could restrict the usefulness of certain applications, such as instant messenger clients,” Dan Moren reports for Macworld.
“Forstall presented a different solution to the problem. Apple would instead roll out a push notification system that apps could use to alert users when remote content had changed,” Moren reports.
“Apple said that it would be available as of September…. [But] the ninth month has come and gone with no sign of the feature, despite Apple shipping a major iPhone OS update during the same period,” Moren reports.
Full article, which speculates that Apple “may have decided to spend more time making sure the notification system worked as advertised before rolling it out to iPhone users at large,” here.
@Lame
One of the key assets at Apple is knowing a little bit about Operating Sistems. A little bit more than you and me together, by the way.
Thee should be a reason for this (a good one, by the way) and a decision on the restriction.
I bet it is one of two (or both): a) Security or b) Energy.
I think that is a PROTECTION and not a FAILURE.
MobileMe still sucks rocks too. Wasn’t there some internally meme that leaked out saying “we’ll make it better, cuz we’re Apple not Micro$#!%” or am I just a dream apple fanboy fool?
MobileMe– I’ve had it since the day they announced it as iTools, and promised that it would be free for life. :/. I do find it to be very useful. I use iDisk regularly to store important files, and to host images.
Sync keeps it all working together nicely, and now that I have an iPhone, it has gotten even better!
As far as Ape missing the deadline, I’m highly disappointed. I don’t feel that they should announce a release date for ANYTHING unless they KNOW the date is safe.
I would have much preferred something along the lines of, “We’re wrapping up the details, and we will have it up and running for you as soon as possible. We are hopeful to have it within the next few months.”
I appreciate the beads up; it gives me something to look forward to. Just don’t promise me something that you’re not sure that you can deliver. I don’t want it before it’s ready though, either. Be honest, give me something to anticipate, but don’t give me false hopes or undelivered promises.
I’ve noticed the Facebook app will show i have messages now with the app closed
The main problem with most smart phones is that multitasking screws up performance and drains the battery. Most system crashes can also be traced back to multitasking programs.
Apple wanted to avoid that.
A massive amount of bullshit from you is not going to change that fact.
But go ahead, keep on spewing your negative bullshit.
Please ignore my typos. I blame the iPhone! :I
Lame, multitasking on the iPhone works fine if enabled by a hack. The only problems are battery life and RAM.
Battery life means that you want a notification service anyway, so that a mostly-sleeping device can be alerted that it needs to wake up so the appropriate application can respond.
RAM is very limited on the iPhone; the platform and API are designed to be useful to people who are not trained embedded developers used to fitting their code in 100K. The alternative would be a pagefile; forget battery life or performance if that ever comes into actual use.
Time to nail Apple to another cross. They missed a deadline, perish the thought. Let’s nuke the suckers.
it’s really simple. not snappy enough!
@Lame
Do you own an iPhone?
“A little bit more than you and me together, by the way.”
A little more than you anyway.
“The main problem with most smart phones is that multitasking screws up performance and drains the battery. “
How? That’s a completely stupid statement. It depends completely on what the background process is doing. A small background process which wakes up occasionally and doesn’t turn on the touchscreen is going to use much less battery than say Google Maps or any other application running in the foreground which keeps the LCD on.
“the platform and API are designed to be useful to people who are not trained embedded developers used to fitting their code in 100K. The alternative would be a pagefile;”
Tell me how running an app in the background has any effect on whether the software engineer is dumb with it’s memory usage or writes code with memory leaks. It’s as easy for a foreground application to allocate way too much memory or leak it over time.
“But go ahead, keep on spewing your negative bullshit.”
What’s negative in wanting exposed a feature the OS is clearly capable underneath, is used by Apple in their own software for the iPhone and exists in any other smartphone OS? Like Apple are the only people in the world who can write sensible multitasking programs?
“Battery life means that you want a notification service anyway, so that a mostly-sleeping device can be alerted that it needs to wake up so the appropriate application can respond.”
The flaws in that logic are many but lets go one by one.
First, and the biggest one means background events can only be triggered from outside the phone. What say you wanted to have an application which woke up every hour and took a GPS position. This is just one of a thousand examples of where an application might want to wake up and do something with internally generated data.
Firstly the code to do that is going to be tiny. No RAM use problems as some of the chicken littles here think. Second the battery use is going to be tiny because the application only does something once an hour. Third the effect on a foreground application is going to be minuscule for the same reason.
You are aware multitasking apps can sleep as well? Probably not.
And finally given that scenario with Push Events, with I’d have to create a “GPS Pinger Server” something that you register with which sends the phone a message every hour, which made it wake up, take the photo and store it. Now you’ve required me to power up the radio, use a bunch of network bandwidth, launch an application, take the position fix and exit that application, all to avoid a few kilobytes at most of memory usage and a tiny bit of CPU usage. I know which iPhone application is going to use less battery.
You’ve also required me to put in place a server farm for my customers and centrally scale it to be big enough to serve them all to act as nothing more than a sleep timer.
Finally how well do events work in airplane mode? Hint, they don’t.
How well do they work while you’re on a phone call in an Edge coverage area? Hint, they don’t.
How well do they work when you’re out of coverage? Hint, they don’t.
So while they may be good for asynchronous events notifying of data ready to be delivered from outside the phone, they’re no substitute for multitasking and background applications.
So how did this sad state of affairs come to be:
1) Steve initially told the developers that no SDK would ever be published, so they coded the iPhone software that way.
2) market pressure forced a U-Turn on Apple, the realized to be a viable Smartphone platform a native SDK would be required.
3) But by then developers had made some design decisions which might have been good in the “No SDK” context, but very bad in the “SDK” one.
4) They cobbled together the SDK we have today, just to get something out on the market.
4) They listed a bunch of limitations, features that real developers would expect to be there. Steve said no problem, that he had an army of morons, mostly photoshop users not developers, who would repeat his words that they were unnecessary features, just as they had repeated his words that a real SDK was unnecessary.
5) They’re working on iPhone OS and SDK improvements to fix the limitations of the cobbled together SDK.
6) Steve will announce that Apple have invented a revolutionary new kind of background application (Actually just the same as everyone else’s)
7) The moron army will then start repeating Steve’s words that background apps are now OK, even revolutionary.
“Do you own an iPhone?”
Yes, and I’m an iPhone developer.
Don’t the following things irritate you about yours?
1) You cannot start a Safari download on a slow Edge network, switch and read your mail (or do anything else on the phone) while that’s completing without aborting the download.
2) Every time you come into enterprise mail, having to wait while it downloads the text of the email you want to view.
3) Glacial switching between pages (applications), even built in ones, and watching and waiting while they restore their state. Why? because they’re perpetually being shut down and re-launched. That uses MORE cpu and battery power not less compared to the application sleeping in the background.
This compromised user experience brought to you by lack of good multitasking and background applications.
There’s a lot to like about the iPhone, it’s non multitasking model for applications is not one of those things.
Switching between Apps is not glacial.
And no developer worth their salt calls Apps “pages”. Maybe if you’re a half-assed code kiddy who came from Windows you might use such lame terminology, real developers don’t though.
“Switching between Apps is not glacial. “
It takes several seconds or longer. That’s glacial to me. You can very easily show how much quicker it would be if the application were still alive.
“And no developer worth their salt calls Apps “pages”.
I called them pages (applications) so that non technical individuals like yourself would know what I was talking about. After all how does someone like you know when the phone is switching to a new application, or what an iPhone application even is? Hint, you don’t. I have to tie it to a concept you might understand.
“real developers don’t though.”
It seems you’re a member of the photoshop moron army who has not one clue as to what real developers do and don’t do.