I 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.
Well, 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 :-)
I haven't looked at the APIs yet, but it will probably be possible to do something like not DCing an ssh connection via the task-completion API, as the example given was uploading photos to flickr.
Yeah 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.
Yeah, 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 :).
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.
They're certainly picking a fight. It's far from clear that they'll win.
If the iPhone loses its dominance in smart phones, this move will have done nothing but antagonize the most obvious heir to the throne. Like nearly everything else Apple does, iAds will have a monopoly on a small market. Meanwhile, much of the iPhone's greatness depends on Google's own products....
Of course! Everyone assumes that Bing is just a
drop-in replacement for Google, but it doesn't
come without costs: Google has a
massive brand identity. The phone with Google search has an implicit advantage over the phone with "Bing".
Google is the default search engine of most Microsoft users. There's no way the iPhone is going to lose Google search. Meanwhile, search is simply not a huge part of my iPhone experience.
Maps is actually a bigger deal to me --- but maps is also easier to replace.
Google is spending upwards of a billion US dollars to make Street View, in the process creating a top-notch street map of the World. And now they provide that data free, I doubt Google maps is so easily replaced, even with Bing Maps.
My girlfriend has a Nokia E55. It is not even remotely close to iPhone and Androids in terms of functionality and ease of use, and still most market share studies will categorize it as a smartphone. And its OS also barely changed since 4 years ago when I had a similar device.
"nobody"?
I was just mentioning it, because i am sick of seeing people sucked into that apple marketing dream and telling it over and over again.
Let's take the whole mobile phone market as measurement. The iphone is still only used by the vast minority, yet it feels like apple users are caught by all that marketing and buzz around apple they reject reality.
Yes, of course, the iPhone has the appstore, it's good hardware and software and shiny and usable and so on. But the reality is STILL that it's a minority.
The reality is that the big old mobile companies have still enough money, resources and potential customers to get.
It's just not that Nokia is making all the fuzz around this as the press does about apple. Steve Jobs farts, press coverage instantly. It's sick.
We don’t know much about the advertising stuff. We’re
learning. We tried to buy a company called AdMob, the
biggest mobile advertising company. But Google came
in and snatched them from us. They didn’t want us to
have them. So we bought another smaller company,
Quattro Wireless. They are teaching us. But we are
babes in the woods. We are learning as fast as we can.
edit: Mostly referring to the 'babe in the woods' comment, along with his perspective on the AdMob purchase.
For all the propaganda you sometimes get from Apple it’s really astonishing how openly Jobs sometimes says stuff like that. I like it. Not something many CEOs would say on the day they announce their entrance into the ad business.
Makes more sense if you note that Apple is among the voices framing Google as the new Microsoft -- a 900-pound octopus with a tentacle in every market.
IIRC, Jobs made a similar statement about being a novice when introducing the first Xserves, acknowledging that this was not an area in which Apple historically had strength, but that this was a first offering.
"Nobody clicks on them, because launching a web browser from an app is incredibly disruptive on a handheld."
Most mobile ad networks doing in-app advertising switched to a web view within the application months ago. In addtion, clickthrough rates are generally pretty high - although I blame 'butterfingers' for a lot of this. (Tracking post-click conversions is hard to do on the iPhone platform but when we've done it I haven't been horribly impressed.)
Well, 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.
If 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).
I 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.
The only issue might be privacy. Your phone book is full of people, 90+% of whom probably do not have an iPhone. On Facebook, every one of your Facebook contacts has clearly already divulged to you that they are on Facebook.
Still, I imagine if Apple made an opt-out method of automatically friending all of your email contacts who have iPhones (or at least an opt-out method of seeing them) it would be popular.
Seems to me like their "Game Center" thing might address this. I personally avoid Facebook, but if I look at my iPhone and can see that 3 of my friends are playing a particular game, I would be influenced much the way I imagine folks who receive Facebook game invites do.
Actually, I'd probably be influenced more, since I know some Facebook games force you to recommend it in order to get access. But if this game center, like XBox Live, can just show me what my friends are actually playing... that's the best endorsement they can give me :)
Mobile ads probably need 'bookmark for later' as a primary option, as in: I'm in the middle of something else right now, but that's interesting enough to review when I have time.
While its true mobile ads suck, its not like others couldn't have done advertisements that are just as interactive as the ones Steve demoed. I'm feel like a large reason why they haven't become popular is because advertising companies don't have the know how to do this sort of thing.
That said, iAds will be successful just because its Apples advertising platform and very high profile.
The beauty of iAds is that it plays to Apple's strengths. In particular, they're the one handset manufacturer that has a unified platform large enough to support an advertising platform and an OS capable of rich interactive ads. Google could have built iAd years ago, but it isn't in their DNA and the fragmentary nature of Android might make it difficult to deploy.
Perhaps iAds will work because of Apple's well known approval process. It's one thing to create interactive ads, it another to keep the quality high enough in general that people bother to click them.
As I suspected, iAd API's are tightly coupled with the OS and dead simple to utilize. I just wrote a sample app. Too bad Apple won't allow further discussions on the subject matter. Everyone who views the new beta API references are under NDA.
Although I believe Steve, new clauses in the iPhone Developers License Agreement seem to restrict the use of information off the phone rather dramatically - including information used for basic ad targeting. If enforced, it'll kneecap a lot of competitors.
Nothing. But likewise, Google's core competence in search doesn't help them at all, while iAd will be baked into the development kit, App Store, and millions of devices.
true but Admod is cross platform, and if Google offers a better deal that could also provide an incentive.
It's not automatically game-over because the magical Steve Jobs thinks he invented advertising
Sure - just like the iPad isn't going to kill off the Kindle overnight. Still, when a competitor can put out a product that halves your market share in its first week on the market, you sit up and take notice.
Everything Google's done in the last few years has seemed bent on extending their search ads monopoly to mobile devices. If success was counted based on devices shipped, Android was doing pretty well. iAd is a serious setback if it turns out to be more profitable than mobile browser ads.
Again what prevent Google from offering those types of interactive ads on webapps with HTML5 and js? you can still get creative with ads, and no one halved anyones market today.
I 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.
Have 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.
I just looked up how to do this, as I couldn't figure it out. Slide open the keyboard, hold the shift key and drag your finger across the text you want to copy. I just tested it on my Droid and it works. Not sure about other Android phones..
Agreed. Android copy and paste only works in 1 out of 10 text fields I've tried it on. Sometimes UI elements give a long-press option to copy. Seriously, copying an address from a text message to google maps should NOT be hard.
It doesn't work in yammer, market, contacts, google voice, or facebook. Google voice at least lets you copy the whole message, but then you have to paste and edit.
Copy and paste works great on my blackberry. Which btw, I switched to after 3 years with the iPhone (first generation and 3G) where I hated copy and paste for the reason stated above (shows up when I don't want it to).
Also, I now love my blackberry much more than I ever did the iPhone. Apps I use are available (maps, yelp, foursquare, pandora), and the multitasking and the advanced features of the OS just keep surprising me. I can use my blackberry to connect to a VPN (it's built in). Coming from the iPhone, I feel like my handcuffs have just been taken off and I'm now free to use my phone the way I want to.
Really? I had the exact opposite experience - constant unwanted cut and paste dialogs on Safari/iPhone, none at all (but there when I wanted it) on Android.
Huh? The iPhone uses long taps or double taps for initiating cut/copy/paste. Long taps work everywhere, double taps work only where there’s no zoom function. That’s a pretty clearly defined set of gestures, how would you be able to bring up the dialog accidentally? Note that as soon as you initiate scrolling and then keep your finger on the screen, you can keep it perfectly still as long as you want or continue scrolling anytime you want. The cut/copy/paste dialog will not show up. There is no reason why that dialog should show up when scrolling.
The only way to bring up that dialog accidentally is to tap on the screen, keep your finger still for more than one second and then try to start scrolling. Seems odd for anybody to try doing that.
Perhaps they've improved things since I left iPhone. But I distinctly remember unwanted, aggressive copy / paste dialogs popping up when I wanted to do move around the page.
> Now we weren't the first to this party, but we're gonna be the best. Just like cut and paste.
I'm not sure if I'm more amazed at how something as inane as this basic operation is touted as a huge feature differentiator, or that the CEO of a multi-billion dollar a year computing company, who's been in the business literally from the start, talks about it with breathless urgency like it's the second coming.
Copy/cut and paste is not a major feature, it should be buried among a list of minor enhancements. It's like the equivalent and releasing a new keyboard with a shift key on either side!
I think you are underestimating how hard it is to implement proper copy/paste on a touchscreen device with no keyboard. I must say that I find Apple's implementation very intuitive and easy to use.
Yes, I am calling it a basic feature. Like tires on a car. Every car has them, but rubber and tires are actually pretty complex things.
No, I'm not saying that it doesn't have certain considerations necessary to make it work well. We can't even get proper clipboard support in Ubuntu these days. So I'm not saying it's really that simple.
Yes, I am saying it's not a big feature. Again, it's like VW coming out with a new Jetta, and one of the specs they touted was "Now with tires!!!"
I think a slightly better comparison is if most other car makers had really lousy automatic transmissions that used 30% of the fuel, and VW waited to announce a car with an automatic transmission until they had one that worked really, really well and was just as efficient as a manual transmission.
You're right, it's exactly equivalent to releasing a keyboard with shift on either side in a world where keyboards don't yet exist. Multitouch is a different world.
1. It's unlikely that anybody has found an optimal cut+paste system for multi-touch devices.
2. The broader range of imaginable ways of implementing cut+paste means that the first solutions to market are relatively unlikely to be considered "good" once the various options have been more fully explored.
3. The large number of ways to implement cut+paste means that there will almost certainly be a significant difference in the quality/usability of different solutions. These disparities mean that the mere presence or absence of a cut+paste solution is not enough to judge whether a product does a good job of fulfilling the need for cut+paste. Simply asking whether a product has a cut+paste system is not helpful for comparing multitouch devices, because not all methods are equal, and some may be virtually unusable.
I think this update is the complete opposite of that trend - Apple is trying to do a ton of new things all at once (ads, game center, multitasking, etc.), almost too much in my opinion.
Apple is looking to establish and to extend their beachheads in both the smartphone and tablet spaces, and this is how you do that. You invest design and development and debug and test. Big-time.
Being a response of marketing and features for the Microsoft Windows Phone 7 and the HP Slate announcements, this looks quite potent.
And interestingly, this approach looks quite reminiscent of how Microsoft slid in a new (Windows) computing platform from up underneath its competitors way back in the 1990s, too.
Right, those features totally never occurred to them before Palm and Google did them. Multitasking? Ads? WALLPAPERS! Where DO they come up with these amazing ideas?
Are we doing feature based checklists now, or comparing good implementations? Multitasking on a small device is largely a UI problem, and it sounds like Apple solved it almost like Palm did. You don't think they do research on what's out there, see how other people have solved problems, and adapt those solutions to what they're trying to do?
I suspect Apple had a roadmap for all of these long before WebOS or Android came out. Could the final form have been influenced by those? Unknowable from outside. I'm not sure in what way you think this looks like Palm's solution.
Apple is probably the market leader in smart phones in the US. But Nokia, as far as I know, is still the market leader in mobile phones, and have a good share of the smart phone market in other places, like Europe, that have been doing more with mobile phones longer than in the US.
Maybe 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.
What 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.
My 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.
Considering 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.
Maybe it doesn't matter to you, but many people buy/play games for gamerscore. It's crazy, I know, but people actually legitimately care about a little number next to their name, a 64x64 icon of an achievement, or the top 10 spots on that leaderboard. It sells more games, it keeps engagement higher, and it is all around a powerful platform piece for Xbox, as it will be for iPhone, as it will be for Windows Phone.
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.
I 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.
Wow, "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.
Mobile ads are going to be near 100% of future online advertising business. If you think most computer users want to be tied down to a desk all day, you're kidding yourself.
The future of small, handheld computing devices is coming.
I seriously doubt that. A real desktop computer is still the easiest device to use for work or non-casual activities. I don't think it's going away, and I don't think that the whole internet will be ported into individual apps for mobile platforms. Real websites can still display normal ads when you visit from your phone's browser.
I've personally heard Eric Schmidt say that mobile is the future of of Google (and this was several years back--they saw it all coming). Mobile phones will provide more people access to the Internet than PCs in the very near future. The phones are already there, it's just your definition of Internet access as many are very low-tech devices that can only use SMS to get mobile data.
Desktop computers will remain popular for work in information based economies like ours, but there are billions of people out there who will access the Internet soley from mobile devices.
(I'm currently sitting in front of my computer but am writing this on a mobile device.)
Is iAd going to compete with AdSense presented on notebooks? I don't think so.
It's not whether or not you are tethered to a desk, but what OS you run and what your relationship to your computer is. I have been using notebooks for the past 5 years and I would not call me mobile in any but the most literal sense.
Google has said themselves they think mobile advertising is their future. That is the reason behind the huge android push. It isn't their main cash cow now, but they know it will be and I think I heard they think that within a 5 yearish span.
This is a problem for HTML5 content in general, isn't it? There's nothing on par with the Flash editor for creating HTML5. Adobe is the company I'd expect to create a visual HTML5 editor, but they're not going to give up the Flash war.
A good HTML 5 authoring tool is going to be so valuable, that whoever has the balls to built it is going to look pretty smart in a couple of years... and Adobe is either going to buy them, or ride Flash down into irrelevance.
You've got a couple months before OS4.0 goes live. Hope you go for it! Quick idea: quick-start ad templates that can be created and shared and sold. But not outright community sourcing, invite required. Threadless mashed with iStockPhoto. Also, thumbs up/thumbs down to allow consumer vote on the iAd
Actually, Apple hosts the ads. I guess that might limit your ability to do A/B testing, too.
It all depends on how Apple structures the ad submission process. From Steve's pause before responding to the "will ads need to be approved?" question, I am going to guess they haven't entirely fleshed it all out, yet.
Given 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.
>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.
iAd - or Apps as ads are great for national brands, but not for everyone else. Google owns online advertising b/c it is point, click, type, done (not done for optimizing, etc, but for building and deploying).
Perhaps Apple is aiming to be a boutique ad net like the Deck or Federated.
Also - The FTC seems poised to block the Google/AdMob deal (http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=0&pz=1&um=1...). Conjecture on conjecture, but if this happens, it would indicate a much more aggressive regulatory environment (makes sense given changing administration), so Apple might face issues of its own. As they said during their presentation, they control ~60% of the mobile browser market....
I suspect that apps will be the big market for iAd, at least initially. You'll be able to see the reviews, screenshots, and buy the app directly from within another app.
It'll be interesting to see if they offer iAd outside of the Apple platforms. These little HTML5 apps they demoed look mobile specific (location, shake, etc) but you could do something very similar for desktop browsers.
I 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-... 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).
Nothing 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.
re: 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)
I agree. A PalmOS or WinCE kind of stylus is probably inferior to multitouch, but a Wacom-style pen that can detect the position while the tip is hovering and has subpixel precision and pressure sensitivity opens a lot of doors.
One 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.
That 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.
Usually Google buys talent e.g. Etherpad or technology e.g. Keyhole. In case of AdMob, Google didn't purchase the technology or people but rather the customers and goodwill.
FCC 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.
Well I thought a direct quote from Steve Jobs about them trying to buy Admob and google not wanting them to buy them before they do was of strong value as a reply on a comment about Admob. But hey, I'll move from your lawn.
The 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.'
There 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)
"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.
Strong 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.
"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.
I'm sorry but I don't agree with you that I'm wrong.
The lack of jailbreak/Android-style multitasking is still a feature. The fact that they took the time to implement it as carefully-designed background services means I don't have to deal with process killers and don't lose my battery to moronic apps that busypoll on GPS.
Or, as they said: "In multitasking, if you see a task manager, they blew it. Users shouldn’t have to ever, ever, ever think about that stuff."
"The lack of jailbreak/Android-style multitasking is still a feature."
"The lack of multitasking is still a feature."
You added qualifications for a reason. Because they say completely different things. You seem to want to suggest I'm arguing against the first. I'm not. I'm arguing against the second.
You are getting tangled up because there are two features we are talking about here.
The first feature is an app ecosystem that doesn't require me to babysit processes.
The second feature is the ability to do things in the background (or, more precisely, do things with more than one application at a time).
I don't care what you call them, but that the iPhone has always had the first feature, and talking it up isn't crazy. I don't think that it makes up for not having the second feature, but I still recognize it as something that makes my iPhone experience better.
The problem is, you equated multitasking to being done one way, and no other way. Other people did this. No multitasking was a feature. It cannot work. It's bad.
I equate it to the result, not the implementation. I don't care how it gets done, as long as it gets done without ruining the rest of the experience.
Not too long ago, we were reading iPad reviews disregarding the lack of multitasking as unneeded. Comments would fill up with mac-addicts defending the lack of multitasking suggesting things like "How can you see two windows on an iPhone" and other crazy things like that. People questioning the needed for multitasking, as well as suggesting that no multitasking was a feature, not a missing feature.
So now everyone is looking at Apple's MT and saying "WoW! It's so amazing!" and the rest of us are saying "It's MT done for the iPhone, okay." It's what we've been asking for, and what so many people were saying to us "It's bad" or "It will hurt the experience" or "MT on the iPhone is a waste."
Maybe you weren't one of those people, but I had enough respond to me saying these very things. And it's just nice to know that Apple, in the end, agreed with me and people like me.
The only defense I ever gave for lack of multitasking was a CPU/battery/memory issues, which are valid. UI problems can be solved in software. It looks like Apple did the right thing by implementing limited multitasking APIs, rather than giving apps full reign over the CPU/memory as some have requested.
There were really only two things that made multitasking a problem (IMHO).
One: battery. They solved that pretty well by not doing true preemptive multitasking (I assume that it isn't preemptive, except maybe for background music). This is likely the right call too. Give apps access to the services they need to do what they want in the background, and keep them suspended the rest of the time.
The second is user interface. I thnk that their task switching solution is probably good too. It looks a lot like palm's, but with an apple flair.
You're right though... any previous defenders who gave other reasons were just deluding themselves. I think that battery life was the main factor. Once they figured that out, the rest became how to make it easy.
I just found too many people promoting the lack of multitasking as a feature. Even with the iPad reviews, lack of multitasking was a bullet point, rather than a flaw. And it was/is a flaw. Yes, they had good reasons for not having it, but that doesn't mean it's less of a flaw. People don't excuse Microsoft for having security problems when those security problems exist because of BC issues. People shouldn't. A flaw, or lack of a feature is simply that.
No. It doesn't/shouldn't work that way. A bad feature is bad. A bad implementation is bad. But you're getting caught up with the implementation. Those arguing for multitasking wanted multitasking done right. They didn't care how it got done, as long as it worked without degrading the rest of the experience.
There were, however, people arguing against multitasking as if their was only one way to implement it.
I don't know what to tell you. Zealots will be zealots. Most people aren't.
And just like there were lots of people saying multitasking wasn't needed at all, there were lots of people saying they wanted multitasking even if it killed their battery life, they wanted the choice. I'm glad Apple didn't listen to either of them.
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.)
I guess you'd say I was one of them, but I'm still going to say I was right:
There are both technical and UI reasons why multitasking as we've known it is hard to do on a mobile phone; those issues constrain what you can do when implementing it, and it certainly looks like Apple's done the best it can within those constraints (which looks pretty good at first glance, by the way).
I agree 100%. We've even been having this exact discussion here on HN in the last 5 days! It's basically been the instant litmus test to identify a rabid fanboy from the rest of the population.
The "discussions", if I can be generous and call them that, have been ridiculous and transparent and usually runs like this:
Normal Person: The i<product> has no multitasking, this is a sorely missing feature
Rabid Fanboy: This omission is actually a "feature". Since Apple never does anything wrong, it's clear that this is actually just better for us. Besides nobody uses multitasking anyways, what could you possibly want to use it for?! Only crazy people want a computing platform that can run more than one thing. Besides Apple needs to keep the user experience perfect like it is (oh it's so orgasmic). And double besides, it already does do multitasking, Apple just uses it for their own things and keeps outside developers (who don't know what they are doing anyways, those idiots) from mucking up the precious user experience and draining the whole battery down in 5 minutes.
Normal Person: That actually doesn't even make any sense. There are plenty of examples of mobile platforms with multitasking that don't have any of the feared problems you are talking about, Palm, Android,...
Rabid Fanboy: THOSE SUCK! SUCK! <hits own head with closed fist over and over> <pause and takes a deep breath as if trying to explain some critical thing to a 5 year old> None of those platforms are the iPhone. NONE OF THEM.
Normal Person: Again, that makes no sense. By all appearances, the fact that this feature is supported just fine elsewhere, and not on the iPhone actually makes Apple look a little inept.
Those characters would be more accurately called "Strawman 1" and "Strawman 2", or perhaps just "Strawman" and "elblanco".
None of the "rabid fanboys" have been claiming that multitasking will reduce battery life down to 5 minutes. Most haven't claimed that nobody uses multitasking; they just say that most normal people can get along without it.
The "normal people"/people who love to troll Apple users/you like to claim that Palm, Android, etc. have great multitasking systems, while ignoring the fact that those platforms do have noticeable UI lag, and generally worse battery life or performance. If you're trying to make a sound argument against Apple's stance of offering limited or no multitasking, you need to acknowledge the tradeoffs and then show that the stuttering, longer page loading times, or lower battery life are worth the overall productivity increase of multitasking. You can't just claim the downsides don't exist.
> None of the "rabid fanboys" have been claiming that multitasking will reduce battery life down to 5 minutes. Most haven't claimed that nobody uses multitasking; they just say that most normal people can get along without it.
Do you even read this site?
Go look back at the last 6 months of posts on the iPhone and iPad. Nearly every single thread brings up this issue, and the fanboys come out in droves to try and explain away this lack of functionality -- most typically with nonsense arguments like I posted above:
- GUIs for multitasking are too hard!
- The battery will drain!
- The GPS will be pinging all the time!
- Nobody uses multitasking!
- I don't want a phone that needs a task manager to kill background apps! (I bet a whole Nigerian Dollar that we'll see task manager apps within 6 months in the app store)
Now Apple comes out with multitasking (limited or not, it doesn't matter, just because Pandora can now play music in the background doesn't mean that Apple pumped their API full of magic pixi dusts where suddenly that won't eat away at the battery.) So now what do we see fanboys carrying on about?
<Backtrack backtrack backtrack, revision, revision, revision>
Fanboys: We never said that multitasking wasn't important! We just said that mumble mumble. Besides it's not lack these are just background apps, there's a special magic API that developers can use that's so carefully designed and built by dwarves in their mountain code smithery out of mithril and fairy dust that it doesn't fall afoul of any of the problems we see everywhere else, like UI LAG!
> The "normal people"/people who love to troll Apple users/you like to claim that Palm, Android, etc. have great multitasking systems, while ignoring the fact that those platforms do have noticeable UI lag, and generally worse battery life or performance. If you're trying to make a sound argument against Apple's stance of offering limited or no multitasking, you need to acknowledge the tradeoffs and then show that the stuttering, longer page loading times, or lower battery life are worth the overall productivity increase of multitasking. You can't just claim the downsides don't exist.
My point is now proven. See your own comment. The OS upgrade and the availability of an API for background services doesn't suddenly free Apple from these constraints either. I think somebody here even made some claim about how other phone makers had a problem with location based apps draining battery by constantly pinging the GPS. Apparently he didn't read the press announcement where Apple allows for just exactly that function in background services.
Either fanboys said multitasking was a bad idea on a phone or they didn't.
And if they did they listed a bunch of reasons why.
None of those reasons are eliminated with this variant of multi-tasking.
sigh It's like fighting with people who suffer from continuous short-term memory loss regarding things they just said.
All of those "nonsense" arguments you listed make sense to me except perhaps for "nobody uses multitasking", by which I suppose you mean "nobody want multitasking" which, obviously, many people did.
The fact that Apple now has an implementation does not invalidate them.
Jobs 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.
The 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.
I'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.
The 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.
I 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).
Seriously? 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.
Which 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.
Right, and the OS itself takes up most of that. I think Apple made the right call there; multitasking is probably more trouble than it's worth when you're that memory-constrained.
So 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.
Absolutely. 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.
Android 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."
Well, 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.
Oh 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.
Nice 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.
So, 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.
They 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.
They 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.
As has been noted many times, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data". Or more succinctly: "I was able to make it work on my jailbroken phone" does not imply "it would work well enough consistently enough to make the broader market happy".
The have done this before, when MMS came out they did not include it for 2G phones when they are perfectly capable of sending MMS.
Someone else pointed out that in the case of multitasking they cannot guarantee that a 3G can handle the general case, that may be true, we shall have to wait and see.
The 3GS has twice as much memory. It's taken Apple years to iron this out, and they have historically made features available on older hardware, so my bet is that 128Meg isn't enough to support common usage of this feature. It's possible that OS4 uses more memory itself.
Can 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.
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.
Perhaps, 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?
Will 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.
Those 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.
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.
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.
My 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?
iPad 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.
The 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.
This 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.
Serious limitations and certainly by no means a seamless experience. For example, you can't get updates on SMS messages unless you use a hack (like Prowl).
One 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.
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?
Don'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
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".
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.