Yeah I was quite busy yesterday, and nobody else picked it up, so we didn’t report on the launch of the iPad 2. Since other websites went completely bonkers over this, we’ll keep it short: there’s a new iPad out. It’s thinner, has a dual-core processor, faster graphics, and has a “new” case developed by Incase Apple. Contrary to all the “later this year” announcements from the likes of HP and RIM, Apple is shipping this thing March 11.
It pushed to the backburner what is the real story of that day: Android Market’s malware released upon unsuspecting users!
http://tinyurl.com/4mgzf9w
Well I’ll be. You mean there’s potential for there to be malware in something that’s not checked before it gets mass distributed through a centralised repository?
Who’da thunk…
At least Android users have the freedom to install malware and crappy applications.
iOS users have the freedom to install crappy applications – there’s about 250000 of them on the App Store, most of them free.
And if you were all grow’d up with teenage kids of your own and you were the one paying the bills for the masses of excess data that those lovely malware apps could wrack up you might just change your tune.
Are you being sarcastic or is it true?
About the Android Market bad press…
How is it that Windows and Android almost always get’s slammed when such news appear, but when it happen in the Apple and Linux world you actually get trashed and flamed for reporting it?
AVG has the most popular security solution available for free through the Android Market. It checks for all sorts of malware including apps and used very little system resources.
http://free.avg.com/us-en/news.ndi-283742
Symantec and Kaspersky and others have similar products also.
Yes no Anti-Virus is perfect but it sure helps.
There are also ways in Android to kill your applications running in the background via settings.
I would like Google to put a widget for this on the homescreen though.
In Googles defense no operating system can audit every line of code of third party applications. And the few apps that had this malware was removed immediately when the problem was detected.
There are vulnerabilies across all platforms.
Not only Android but iphone and Symbian also.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10443800-245.html
But they are all working to improve it.
Google has recently made some big security firm acquisitions including Zynamics.
http://www.mobilemarketingwatch.com/google-announces-acquisition-of…
Apple is also working on improving security on all it’s products.
http://www.edibleapple.com/apple-asks-security-experts-to-examine-o…
I’m meant to run Anti-virus software on my phone as well now? Fuck that.
>”I’m meant to run Anti-virus software on my phone as well now? Fuck that.”
Except if you’re still rolling with a 3110 that device in your hand is a handheld computer with a sophisticated os that can, by way also make phone calls.
I think malware writers just love peoples hatred for antimalware and the so called experts that ridicule it.
Makes there jobs so much easier.
If we need antimalware, it’s because modern OS give apps access to a huge amount of private data, put something as huge and complex as a modern web browser at the core of a desktop shell, and more generally are full of terrible design decisions from the point of view of security.
Antimalware is a poor solution to a real problem. They make sure that a given malware can only strike a limited amount of time. But they don’t solve the core problem which is that malware exists and is working.
I’d even go as far as saying that antimalware is heading to self-destruction in the long run. Their approach to security forces more and more malware to appear everyday. Thus, antimalware themselves have to become more and more bloated to detect them all, or to use flawed wide-range algorithms which only manage to detect explorer.exe in the long run, and to force malware to become even more clever.
As malware becomes more clever, antimalware becomes even more bloated in order to detect it, and thus even more of an unacceptable hurdle. This means that there is a higher and higher desire to get rid of it. Moving to a niche platform like Linux or OSX is a solution, but it would be best if we could stop fleeing and strike back with an OS model that’s actually very secure, without hurting user freedom too much.
Edited 2011-03-04 20:11 UTC
A leading app developer had to be banned from the App Store after they were caught harvesting contact details.
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25980
There are other cases of Apple’s approval process not being so foolproof as they would like to believe.
So… Just out of curiosity, do you also think that antivirus programs make an unpatched release of Win 9x perfectly secure ?
Gotta love this “there’s a blackbox in the way of that binary of unpredictable behavior, I have nothing to fear from it” mentality…
It’s about mitigating the risk not elimating it, because that is impossible.
Sure, but I’m talking about mitigating a risk well. A mere backdoor is all it takes to crash the supposed security gained by a review process. On the other hand, not giving random apps the right to read phone contacts and other private data, and other basic OS security systems, are harder to exploit…
It’s kind of like the difference between the West and China. In China there is less crime and violence and everything is controlled by the central government. But where would you rather live? In the West or under Apple’s rule?
That’s a poor example, but a good analogy… A better example would be living in America in the 19th Century. Would you rather live in the Wild West, where crime was rampant but you were free to do as you pleased… Or you could live in a big city with a strong police force, where you have to live by the rules/law but you are safer from crime…
You got it totally wrong. China is more violent than the west. Walk through shanghai, some neighborhoods embed broken glass into the wall tops to stop people jumping them. In the buses there’s serious problems with crime and people getting stabbed on the bus itelf, mostly gangs. And no one has the right to defend themselves.
Look at xinjiang (western province). Muslim terrorist problems for decades. Two years back there were problems that made the LA riots look extremely tame. People on buses randomly injected with HIV, people getting yanked out of cars and beaten to death, etc.
Please don’t confuse freedom of the press in the US with “more violent”. And please live in both places before you make such claims. I could go on.
According to a Russian I know, it was a well-known fact that “there was no sex in Russia during Soviet days.” Likewise, the Soviet Union didn’t have corrupt officials or environmental problems, and everyone in the Eastern Bloc was delighted to live in the Workers’ Paradise. After all, D,D·D^2Du~N~N‘D,~N (The News) and D?~NEURD°D^2D'D° (The Truth) never reported any of these things, so they must not have occurred.
…well, until Stalin died, or until Krushchev died, or until Brezhnev died, or until Gorbachev through Yeltsin. So, corruption ended once Putin arrived in office!
That was the story from 3 days ago
One thing I’ve noticed reading comments on several iPad 2 related articles (apart from the usual horde of Android trolls) is that there seem to be a lot of pissed off individuals out there, because other people are choosing to spend $500+ on a tablet. I haven’t seen so much hate for a product since Microsoft added product activation in Windows XP. So what’s with all the hate anyway? If you have no use for a tablet, then don’t buy one, and STFU already. ‘Oh, it’s just a big iPod Touch’, they cry. Yeah, just like a 50″ LCD is just a big 15″ TV, but I bet a lot of you have one of those big sons of bitches sitting in your living room right now. Why are you wasting your money?
Hell, I’ve seen people talking about how much of a waste of money tablets are because they’re just toys, and some of these same people own multiple game consoles. Pot, meet kettle. Hell, at least you can read on a tablet, so you might actually learn something.
Disclaimer: I don’t own a tablet, and I own an Android smartphone.
Edited 2011-03-03 20:52 UTC
I don’t see the use in a tablet *for myself*, but if other people want them – that actually makes me happy!
This doesn’t mean I’m not buying a tablet, though – use or no use, they’re shiny. However, if I’m buying one, it’s going to be the Palm TouchPad with webOS. I want real multitasking, not My First OS^a"c multitasking.
Umm, you don’t see a use for one, but you know you want to be able to do multiple nothings at once.
I see…
And it’s interesting, others announce dual / multi-core mobile processors / devices that we won’t see for aeons and there’s major knee tremblers here, Apple actually ship it (well, will next week), in quantity, and it barely rates a mention. And in typical Apple hater fashion I’ve even seen someone write (on another site) that the $4.99 iMovie and Garage Band is just another way for Apple to make more profit out of something that ships free on the Mac.
Gotta love the “I deserve everything for nothing” generation.
Yeah, because writing a story on a tablet is REALLY high on my list of priorities when I just worked 12 hours a day each day for the past 14 days.
Right back at ya.
Damn, I wish my work load was that light – only 14 days straight? Go into business for yourself and work MINIMUM 14 hour days for 18 months with the only days off being Christmas Day, Good Friday, and your wedding anniversary (through threat of death), then come talk to me.
And how do I expect everything for nothing? What you mean because I thought there might actually be a story here about things surrounding the release of V2 of what is by a long margin the most successful tablet device on the market?
Yeah but where’s your tablet story?
Bingo.
Leo? is that you?
Luxury, luxury! We used to dream of working only 14 hours a day! We had get up every morning – 15 minutes before we went to bed – then work 26 hours each day, and every night our parents would thrash us to death with broken bottles and dance on our graves!
>> Damn, I wish my work load was that light – only 14 days straight? Go into business for yourself and work MINIMUM 14 hour days for 18 months with the only days off being Christmas Day, Good Friday, and your wedding anniversary (through threat of death), then come talk to me.
Let me be the first to say:
HA-HA!
/employee
Meh, as if 12 hours / day is anything. I kept at it for 17-18 days for two weeks, that includes lunch break and a quick dinner break (sandwich and a cup of coffee). My point? It makes me freaking manly.
Well I do believe you have some colleagues writing something now and then as well don’t they? I mean the iPad 2 was dominating the news two days ago, iOS 4.3 was announced as well and OSAlert reports one day late with a 3-line article. I mean this seems pretty big news for a site like this, at least news you don’t want to bring a day late while everybody has already moved on to another subject.
Believe me I don’t like Apple at all, I own no products and I even hate them but OSAlert not reporting on it while all other websites do is a big fail in my eyes and I find your reaction a bit arrogant as well when someone brings that up between nose and lips. That’s not how you treat your readers if you want them to come back.
I mean do you really think we care if you would even work 24 hours a day for 10 years long? I don’t think so, most of us are here just for quality news. That’s the point he was trying to make. We all work hard while you are acting like you’re the only one. Dude I feel sorry for you.
I don’t know what your expectations are from your readers but if I were you I wouldn’t keep doing it like this or you might lose a lot of visitors but given your reaction you probably don’t care about that either.
I don’t know about iOS 4.3, but the iPad 2 is not really something so big and groundbreaking we should absolutely have a look at it on the day it’s out.
It’s just a maintenance release, like the iPhone 3GS : same thing as the previous one, with a faster processor and a few minor features which should have been there from the very beginning anyway.
In my opinion, in this keynote, Garageband/iPad was quite a bit more interesting
Edited 2011-03-04 09:17 UTC
One person’s “fail” is another person’s “success”.
I thought it was quite refreshing to not have all the “new Apple shiny” articles on OSAlert, instead getting other stories about interesting things.
That’s one of the nice things about frequenting multiple news outlets: you get a more rounded view of the news instead of just the same 4 stories repeated by everyone.
Ever considered writing an article that would suit your desires, so that you would be guaranteed one story you would want to read?
As master Apple apologist you are doing your Job well fanboi
I’m not quite sure what wonderful world of chocolate and unicorns you’re living in.
But iOS does have multi-tasking.
I’ve been coming to OSAlert for quite a while now, many many years.
And we’ve gone to actually a great site with lots of news on what was happening, to Thoms personal site to slam Apple at every possible turn.
It’s not professional journalism. Keep the bashing of any product on your own personal blog so we don’t have to read that nonsense.
It’s kinda more like task switching, but feel free to keep bashing Thom, like it’s your own personal blog.
On the one hand, iOS doesn’t really have true multitasking, so Thom is mostly right on that point. On the other hand, I’m not sure why a typical tablet user needs real multitasking, so I suspect that Thom’s requirement that a tablet have it for him to buy it is mostly the kneejerk geek habit of wanting some kind of mental checklist to have a checkmark in that box.
As for OSAlert being anti-Apple, if we don’t get people accusing us of being anti-[whatever] at least a few times a day, we’re not doing our jobs.
PArtly, yes, but also the idea that application developers don’t have to specifically take multitasking into account. On webOS, it’s always been a core part of the operating system, interface, and developer mindset. On iOS, it’s clearly an afterthought, and access to the list of “open” applications is cumbersome and not as easy as it is on webOS.
When I was still using my iPhone 3GS, I found it very annoying never to know for sure which applications properly saved state and which didn’t – you simply couldn’t know. Many applications would always bring you back to their ‘home’screen when switching to them.
Multitasking on iOS is not multitasking in the way that the world has come to understand it. While it is perfectly adequate for most people, it isn’t for me.
Love the people saying that you are bashing Apple, then Microsoft, then Google,
Could not get enought of it.
unrelated link.
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/03/03/steve-jobs-reality-distortio…
I may not be a typical tablet user, but it would be nice to start a process and switch to another without that process quitting on me: even something as mundane as downloading a large web page, or a youtube video, or what have you.
Apple basically views tablets as glorified televisions, rather than computers with unusual input devices. I don’t even understand why they felt compelled to revert to task-switching. It’s bizarre.
Still perfectly usable for majority of users (and by me).
App switching in iOS is fast. UI is smooth. No app will consume too much cpu time in background. It is not a desktop system. Battery is a precious resource.
Edited 2011-03-04 11:54 UTC
That’s the trade-off, and I guess this is what separates the potential customers – the ones that don’t care about multitasking, they just want to access the web or a watch a movie in a compact manner, read small device, or the ones that are more suited to larger screens, usually working on several tasks at the same time. Personally I fall under the second category, and I simply don’t see use of tablet in my lifestyle, but that doesn’t mean it’s useless altogether. In fact, I’ve tried iPad 1 at computer store, and I actually liked it – very smooth, polished, easy to use, compact. But as I said, I can’t drag yet another device with me – I already have Android, laptop and 22 inch screen at the workstation, so it makes no sense. The sales numbers of iPad, however, are impressive, I saw something like 15-16 million (correct me if I’m wrong) – I’ve never thought that a tablet can sell that successfully.
AFAIK, most if not all those tablet platforms support “multi-tasking” in a form of “task switching”. So arguing whether it is indeed multitasking or not is so retarding at best (since there were so many people have already argues so far)
I’m typing this on an iPad, I’ve used Windows since 1.0, MacOS since 1.0, Unix since SunOS 6, and Linux since 2.2. I’m sorry to have to break the news, but despite Mr. Jobs best efforts to redefine the word, the iPad does NOT multitask. And yes, it matters a LOT in many contexts.
Would you like to make any argument to support your statement? Or are you happy with simple gainsay and opinion?
The iPad running the latest OS does provide the developer with APIs to support multitasking, it is up to the developer to use them.
Sure, at the risk of repeating myself a bit. Remember, I have an iPad, so the old “you just hate Apple” canard doesn’t apply here.
Since this is a technical discussion, let’s cover terminology first. Multi-tasking is “the concurrent or interleaved execution of two or more Jobs by a single CPU”. A Job is “an application program”. So for an OS to multi-task, we would expect it to run two or more apps concurrently.
iOS 4 added what Mr. Jobs called “multi-tasking” about a year ago. The feature so named adds API calls that permit one app to establish operating system services for 5 specific actions to be maintained while a different app is running, such as playing music or notification.
As long as you only want to “multi-task” those 5 things in the background, the things that Apple considers important, you’ll probably claim iOS multi-tasks. It’s a great illusion, kind of like Windows 3.x “multi-tasks” as long as all of the apps currently running cooperate nicely.
But the paradigm breaks down badly and exposes reality when you want to do something different.
For example, if you want to create an encrypted tunnel to a corporate intranet, you must maintain the connection – otherwise the firewall will terminate the connection. Since Apple didn’t consider this important, the iPad can’t sustain the connection.
The user experience looks like this. Open enterprise app, enter token, establish connection (15 second process), begin working. Oops, need to check a different app – switch out, switch back… and enter another token, re-establish connection, find where you were working, and resume. Pretty soon, you’re bald.
Laptops with an OS based on the Windows NT kernel, MacOS and Linux kernels have no trouble with this scenario – they multi-task. Android has no problem, either, and (I presume) webOS does fine as well. iOS (and, I presume, WinP7) can’t handle this scenario… because they don’t implement multi-tasking.
To help preserve the illusion of multi-tasking (even though iOS doesn’t), Apple also added suspend-and-resume protocols to iOS 4. An app can save its state when it is killed, and reload state when restarted. This works pretty well for local computation, but poorly where a live connection is required.
Another example, since we can argue Apple shouldn’t be used in a corporate setting. If I want to switch between an on-line game in the Words With Friends app and a web-based dictionary in Safari, WWF requires 10-15 seconds to reconnect and resume the game – the connection is lost when the app switches out, because… iOS can’t multi-task.
Contrast this with (say) Maemo running the Flash client for Lexulous in the web browser. I can readily switch between apps, and the game just keeps on plugging. You can even watch it and other apps updating their screens in the app switcher simultaneously.
Now, since one of those five operating system services that will run in the background on iOS is notification, WWF *can* tell you when your opponent has moved, even while you’re in a different app. You’d be forgiven for thinking WWF is actually running in the background – but it’s not. That’s an operating system dialog set up by WWF before it terminated to provide the illusion of multiple user tasks, not actual multi-tasking.
In Safari on my iPad, even switching between “tabs” sometimes results in a forced page reload – truly frustrating when I just wanted to check a number on the currently loaded but complex web page.
Sorry for so much detail, but, well, you asked.
Now I’m not arguing the iPad is “bad” or “poorly designed” – Apple employs some of the most talented industrial and user interface engineers on the planet. And they got quite a bit right on the device, so that I enjoy using it for many things. Sales figures support (I think) the contention that they got a lot more right than wrong. But the trade off between multi-tasking and rapid response isn’t the one I prefer.
And claiming that 5 operating system maintained activities plus suspend-and-resume is the same thing as multi-tasking isn’t consistent with well-established computer science, and also misrepresents the actual capabilities of iOS-based devices.
Hope this helps.
A coworker of mine is a big fan of webos, but will be migrating to Android from his Palm Pre because of the piss-poor selection of apps. So, when even the fanboys of the platform are defecting, I’d say the Touchpad is done before it’s even out of the gate. Sad to have a slick tablet with real multitasking, when you don’t have much to run on it.
Do you know a little company called HP? Yeah, Palm could not have the guts to push their system forward, but I seriously doubt HP is here just to play
Those kind of smart platforms are valuable because of apps. Windows dominates because of apps.
HP has to either entice(Apple, Adnroid) or pay off developers(Microsoft WP7 apps) to get things started.
Apple got the benefit of being the first “blowout” smartphone OS that had a proper app repo and reasonably cheap development tools(I’m looking at you Symbian….)
Android has a s***load of Java developers at a standby.
HP will have to pay some high profile developers…
As I’ve always said… it’s not about the platform, but about what you can run on it. (And I’m talking about apps that are out there RIGHT NOW, not what the potential of a thing is.) Most geeks still don’t understand this.
Edited 2011-03-04 00:40 UTC
It’s debatable as soon as the plaform addresses the needs of the user.
As an example, if the OS has excellent Facebook integration, then facebook users don’t need a facebook app.
And if a proper implementation of Flash ever comes to the mobile space, a lot of mobile games will become legacy. Because, let’s face it, many of the most popular mobile games (angry birds, cut the rope…) are nothing but the transcription of popular flash games to platform-specific code.
Edited 2011-03-04 05:59 UTC
Tablets are to PCs what magazines are to scientific journals. Light, designed to fill idle moments, and not make you think too much.
I played with Galaxy Tab a couple of months ago, and realized it would be handy for just browsing the web and reading documents. It would replace my laptop while I’m sitting on the couch. The moment I need to create something or work on something that needs lots of resources, I’m going to something else.
One thing that would be neat would be to have one device I can plug into different form factor docks. Phone form factor, tablet form factor, laptop form factor, and desktop form factor. It would have to have four cores, 8GBs of RAM, and 2TB of space to replace my desktop, but it would be nice to be able to take it with me.
The reason there is so much tablet hate is because we can’t get away from the news stories about them or fanboys squealing with glee at the chance to show their affluence.
The iPad gets free press coverage because all the publishers hope it will save them from the internet. It will be bought in huge numbers by the me too people just because they’ve heard about it. All the while it distracts from more open technologies with the mantra like call “There’s an app for that.” The non-tech savvy public are being convinced that they need a different app for every task because they like to spend money. It gives them a buzz to think that they have just bought something worthwhile, a small object of desire. Most of these “apps” could be done in a web browser, or in Flash, or any other number of ways than an app compatible only with one company’s device. (Don’t even bother to spew Job’s anti-Flash propaganda).
The whole tablet paradigm shift is a marketing hoax. Apple are kings of marketing, know how to prey on someone’s sense of self importance. Know that the average human is more interested in how flashy something looks than whether he is able to do the same things on cheaper and more flexible platforms. These same people will now upgrade their tablets every 1 or 2 years instead of every 3 or 4 as is the pattern with PCs.
Apple will be laughing all the way to the bank and still won’t pay out to shareholders.
What, more open technologies… like Flash? As you requested, I won’t spew Job’s anti-Flash propaganda. Instead, I’ll spew my own:
http://www.lostechies.com/blogs/jimmy_bogard/archive/2008/11/08/boy…
http://tips.webdesign10.com/flash-cookies-privacy
http://www.itweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id…
For whatever faults it may have, iOS was our big chance to get rid of Flash, but Android users kept bitching and whining about it, and spoiled it for the rest of us. And why? So they could watch videos on their 3-4 inch phones and/or play some lame-ass ‘match 3’ games? To hell with Flash.
As for native apps vs web apps, I prefer native apps for most things. Always have, even before the iPhone was introduced. The nice thing about the app store approach, where you can browse different categories is that it opens your eyes to things and services you never knew existed, even if such things have been available on the web for years. For example, there are apps where you can browse showtimes for local movie theaters and even purchase tickets so you don’t have to stand in line. Of course, this has been available for a long time on the web, but unless you found out about it by accident or some random advertisement, how the hell are you supposed to know that?
Edited 2011-03-04 02:58 UTC
Well seasoned PC users are used to this kind of hype, and Apple could not keep up.
We already had the soundcards battle (remembered the gravis ultrasound), the graphics card slaughtering, and the CPU wars (which is still somehow happening with tablets).
We are kinda bored by this kind of contest, but it’s the same stuff coming with the smartphones and tablets.
For me the thing that annoy me the most is the strings attached to these device (either a phone contract or another computer), to make these slightly more useful.
Apple have been very clever in its strategy, ipod/iphone/ipad sales have helped selling more macbook. And the “success” story of developers making thousands of dollars by developing apps did help a lot (wonder how many young dev have invested in a Mac to make their own apps ?).
Hear, hear.
I was thinking recently what Usenet would look like if it were built today for “curated computing” platforms. We’d probably have a dedicated app for every individual newsgroup, which would replicate each others’ functionality – and yet still manage to be inconsistent/incompatible with each other.
My next portable computing platform will be an iPad. I use my laptop for the same things I can do on an iPad, but the iPad is a much better platform for those things.
http://thestartupfoundry.com/2011/03/05/if-ipads-are-%E2%80…
But not from Apple. It’ll be the Blackberry Playbook once it is available. Do I need it. Nah… It’s what I want. A shiny new toy but something that’ll give me the full web experience, flash and all. Other than that it’s running other than Android – QNX, very interesting.
The smartcover is pretty neat idea.
But if you have a cover, then why not also add a keyboard to it.
Edited 2011-03-04 10:46 UTC
Have you seen the Dell Inspiron Duo? A young man who just joined my team has one, triple-booting Win 7, Ubuntu 10.10, and Android 3. It’s a tablet with a cover that’s also a keyboard; is this what you had in mind?
iOS from 4.0 does support proper multitasking. Any app complied against the 2.x to 3.x SDKs will not support multitasking in anyway… And while there were lots apps linked against these old SDKs in the app store it was a pain and you had no idea if your app state would be saved or not… But I’ve not encountered that for a long time (the last app to suffer that for me was Engadget’s apps, but that’s been updated now).
As a developer myself, if I need to execute code while my app is in the background, Apple have provided code callback hooks where I can do this. Most of the time an app is waiting for user input so background code execution is rare… Especially on a mobile device where every line of code executed is going to take some battery life
This is not “proper” multitasking. If an app does not need input, then its Wait() invocation (or whatever the API calls it) should put it out of commission. In addition, if it should receive notification to suspend graphical effects because it’s no longer front and center and you don’t want to drain the battery, there could be API calls for that as well. That would be proper multitasking.
The wait it works now, when I’m downloading a YouTube video in either the YouTube or Safari apps, I can’t go check my email while I wait, because neither YouTube nor Safari multitasks even in iOS 4.x. So I have to sit and wait for the video to download. That’s pathetic.
People who say that iOS’ interface is fast and smooth have clearly never used it. The App Store itself is a model of poor interface design (closing a zoom on an app returns one to the first page of a search, not the tenth page where one tapped the app’s icon to obtain information) and sluggish responsiveness.
Sure, the iPad is useful and attractive. But it seems to have gotten a lot of important details wrong. The iPad2 with its A5 may help cover a lot of these things, but I’d love to see how the WebOS does it, if only I could find a WebOS tablet to play with!
iOS is event driven. All your code is executed by event handling methods, there isn’t an event loop that waits for an event. So your App by default isn’t executing, except to handle an event (user or system generated).
That is exactly what does happen when an app enters the background. In my games I use a 30th of a second timer event to call my graphics update method. When the app goes intothe background, iOS pauses this timer, and then resumes this timer when my app returns to the foreground.
So by your definition, iOS does have proper multitasking! Please read the developer documents before crying foul!
This is an issue with the Safari and YouTube apps, probably due to Apple’s obsessiveness about battery life. But if you read the developer doc, there is a method that allows your app to keep downloading if you app enters the background, Apple chose not to use it in these apps… But do use it in their own iTunes app on iOS (which will contiune download songs and movies in the background)…
There are plenty of other browsers and YouTube playing apps in the AppStore I’m sure you could find one that suits your needs of opening something and doing something else…
nothing to do with iOS. The AppStore app is actually executed by the JavaScript engine (which apparently works 2times faster in the next iOS .x release), that again was a design decision that app… Who knows why Apple did it that way.
I too am looking to see if WebOS can work well on a tablet, I thought that it was rather good on a phone.
Edited 2011-03-05 09:53 UTC
In a properly multitasking system that uses an event loop, this is what a Wait() command does; it places the application in a non-executing state, waiting for an event.
Actually, your words imply the opposite of what you think.
In proper multitasking, the multitasking is transparent both to the app and to the developer: the app is switched seamlessly into and out of the active process state without the need for any invocations on the developer’s part. An application that is computationally intensive does not have to request to be multitasked; it just is. Even if “hidden” in a GUI, it comes out of suspension occasionally thanks to the scheduler. In a preemptive system, it could even preempt the frontmost app in the GUI.
From what both you and the other guy described, this is not what occurs when an app enters the background on iOS. You both imply that iOS suspends the app, not that the app suspends itself. In my hypothetical computational app, computations would cease when the user presses the home button, because iOS thinks it should stop, not because the app thinks it should stop. On a proper multitasking system, the computational app would continue computing even if another app were brought to the foreground.
You may protest, as the other guy did, that iOS allows hooks so that the computational app could continue computing in the background. This is nevertheless not proper multitasking. In proper multitasking, a well-functioning app suspends only the app suspends itself, not when the OS notices its interface has moved to the background.
Please read up on definitions before crying foul.
And this is my point. In proper multitasking, an app doesn’t have to invoke a method to allow it to continue receiving and processing events. It receives events when they occur, because the OS brings them out of suspension.
“Nothing to do with iOS”… “2times faster in the next iOS .x release”… do you not see the contradiction?
You’re not contradicting me here; I called it poor interface design.
Edited 2011-03-05 16:34 UTC
event drive like qt or gtk. just becus you cant se the event loop dosen mean it is not there. there is a eventloop for every thread. where do you think objects get freed etc.
they want the mindset of event driven programming but the system is not built like that from the ground up.
I’m not sure what your point is here. If you are implying that that qt/gtk have per-thread event loops (they don’t necessarily, but they can) and that iOS/CocoaTouch does not (ditto) you are wrong. Being event-driven is not the differentiating factor over whether your system multitasks or not.
Having used all three toolkits extensively, I can confidently say that your argument does not support your conclusion.
That’s probably because his arguments were not meant to support the conclusion but it’s really the other way around.
He was debunking the faulty “it is event-driven but it has no even loop” that the parent poster was putting out. Actually, @dizzey was providing a counter-example to what @bloodline said in “iOS is event driven. All your code is executed by event handling methods, there isn’t an event loop that waits for an event.“
To “add more water to your mill” as we say in French (i.e. more weight to your argument), this is not even proper multitasking. Look at desktop applications: they don’t use any kind of API so that they can benefit from multitasking. Normally, programs do not care about multitasking: it is the OS’s job to provide that abstraction.