That's pretty old.
WinMo task managers have come a long way. Nowadays they're visual task images or easy to tap lists with a hold bringing up a kill option. See below. And they can be assigned to any buttons, which is super handy.
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Multitasking...I don't get it.
- Thread starter ODog4523
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That's pretty old.
WinMo task managers have come a long way. Nowadays they're visual task images or easy to tap lists with a hold bringing up a kill option. See below. And they can be assigned to any buttons, which is super handy.
If the app isn't using an API, then it's just frozen. Nothing is really running in the background, so why is a quit button needed?
Apple could completely get rid of the App Switcher and multitasking would still work exactly the same. The App Switcher is just a convenience to quickly jump between those few apps you're switching back and forth between in your workflow. For example a blogger switching between Wordpress, Safari, and Photos. Even if those apps are all on different app pages, they'll be located side by side in App Switcher - assuming they're the last three apps you've been jumping between.
App Switcher is NOT a task manager, you don't need to ever access it and you get all the remaining multitasking benefits (background music, etc). Nothing to manage, nothing to close.
I think the concern isn't the fact that an app may or may not be using resources while sitting in the background, but the fact that the multi-task dock seems to be limited in its number of slots. Even if it's not limited, the fact that every app automatically gets sent to the switcher automatically means that you'd end up with a long list of apps down there to scroll through after a while unless you manually close apps you know you won't want later. Having to clean up that section periodically would get really old really fast with the current method of holding down an icon and then tapping a tiny minus sign.
The suggestion of flicking apps out of the dock in a puff of smoke would be fantastic. It would not only be much quicker, but would mimic removing icons from the dock in OS X on the Mac.
Yeah, that's something I don't get either. Let's say I run 30 apps throughout the week and never bothered to double tap the home button. Then when I do, I'll have 30 apps lined up in that multi-task bar? Cuz I don't think it automatically goes away once the backgrounding process is done....
If they are thirty different apps, probably. If it's the same dozen apps or so the icons will just keep shuffling around.
The App Switcher is not limited. At least, I haven't reached that limit.
But, why would you choose to launch apps from the App Switcher? Having used 4.0 all day, I don't think launching apps is its intended purpose. You can only see four apps at a time. I think you would launch most apps from the home screen just like in 3.0.
Where the App Switcher comes in handy is when you're actually multitasking between a few apps or when you need to jump out of one app to grab something and want to jump right back to your original app. For example, you're surfing Safari, you launch SMS from the home screen to see what hotel your friend is staying at, then you use App switcher to go right back to Safari. It gets even more useful when the apps you're working between are scattered on different launch screens or with 4.0 are buried in different folders. If you're just launching a game that you haven't played since yesterday, you just launch it from a home screen.
Yeah. That seems to sum it for me, as far as I can tell. If you're the sort of user who doesn't install hundreds of apps, maybe with your working set of apps all on one or two pages, then I'm assuming that you could carry on using 4.0 as if the App Switcher wast't there at all, just launching everything from the home screen as before.
There is only one instance of an app allowed to be active isn't there? If I launch calculator and do "2+2=" so that the display shows "4" and then go to the Home screen and launch calculator again I won't launch a new instance of calculator will I, but rather it will behave exactly as if I had gone to the App Switcher and switched back to the active/paused instance of calculator?
I wonder how fast this will be. For me (who isn't that fussed about "true" multitasking beyond what was already in 3.x) the challenge, and the biggest benefit, will come from suspending and resuming a Safari instance with lots of tabs (pages) open (especially on the iPad but I think the principle will be the same on the iPhone). If I want to quickly drop out of a browsing session and check a note or do a calculation or something then I don't want a lengthy delay when I restart Safari and it reloads all its pages so I'm hoping this is all quick and it doesn't need to cheat too much and refresh some of the page data from the source pages on the internet.
I'll probably get flamed here but, since I don't expect to be running Skype or doing ftp downloads in the background, this really looks to me to be just a suspend/resume and effectively it's making iPhone app switching behave just like it did on a Palm V in the 1990s. OK, PalmOS at the time completely closed and reopened the app but it was all so quick (because it was all so simple) that to the the user it looked like the app had suspended and then resumed. This is no bad thing because it served me well for many years.
One thing is that I hope that app developers are protected, or given API support, for dealing with phone resets. For instance what happens to a game that maintains a local high score table (HST) over a reset? If the game keeps the HST in memory and only writes it to permanent storage when exited then in the new scheme couldn't data be lost on a reset, even if the game hadn't been used for the last hour but had been run that session so was in the paused/suspended state when the crash happened. What is done to force the game to perform a flush of the HST and any other state to flash when it is suspended? Even if 4.0 puts the HST on flash as part of the suspend then, in the event of a crash, would the iPhone somehow unpick the pieces after a reset or would the app, when it was first re-launched, be given some indication that it had had an abnormal exit on the last run and be given access to its last saved state before the crash so that it can unpick the pieces itself? Or are there APIs to do almost atomic writes (or cache-like write-through) to persistent memory so that apps can protect critical state like the HST (or the current page of a book in a book reader) against a crash?
- Julian
The way apple has put in multitasking is pretty great actually. So say you are using the background upload API. So you want to use the facebook app to upload a few pictures or god forbid maybe one day a video LOL. Well why do you need to run that entire app? Because if it was "true multitasking" then you would have to run every process that the facebook app needs. From the graphical output to the chat client.
I don't see how this differs from a good demand-paged virtual memory system. When doing a background upload, even with a huge monolithic process that includes the GUI and the chat client, while uploading there should(*) be no code being executed from 90% of the pages in the executable so all that GUI and chat client code is effectively not there because, when another app runs, the VM manager would just reclaim those code pages and, since it knows that it's read-only code, it won't even flush it out to backing store (flash in this case), it'll just overwrite it with new stuff.
(*) Maybe the win with Apple's explicit concept of background tasks is to force the developer's into optimising code locality for work that will be done in the background. In my example above, if the app is badly written and the upload code is scattered across many pages of the executable then the VM will have fewer inactive code pages to reclaim for use by other apps; the Apple way seems to preclude this as a possibility which is a good thing.
- Julian
Application Switcher (Task Manager) dock is completely redundant. It does the same thing as launching an app from home screen but instead of clicking home button once you have to do it twice and then scroll because you can see only four icons at the same time. It doesn't make sense. Multitasking from home screen would be a way to go.
I think the assumption (which I hope is correct) is that the logic on launching from the home screen is:
IF <app is already running> THEN <switch to running instance of app> ELSE <launch app>.
From that perspective the app switcher isn't strictly necessary to switch apps because, once you've launched solitaire for the first time, going back and launching it again from the home screen will be the same as if you'd gone to the app switcher and switched to it. The app switcher does appear to offer app closedown of course which can't be done from the home screen.
If I've quickly popped out of Safari and into a calculator then I would probably use app switcher to get back to safari but for most cases (e.g. the solitaire example) I'm not going to try to remember whether I've already launched it before and, if I think I have, make a point of going to the app switcher; I'll just launch it (or switch to it as appropriate) from the home screen.
- Julian
That's called marketing. Heck Steve is calling the task switcher multitasking when for the clear majority of applications you're not multitasking - they're put into a sleep state. Yeah a handful of apps like pandora will continue in the background but make no mistake its not "true" multitasking.
As people are asking what definition of multitasking here's webster's
While the iPhone has limited multitasking Some "jobs" can run concurrently most cannot so its not true full blown multitasking.
*donning flameproof suit
I still don't get the 'multitasking' element - I guess it isn't true real time as we have in-app sms.
Say I was playing Angry Birds and was halfway through a level and I wanted to check Facebook and then Safari for cinema times and then I wanted to resume my game of Angry Birds - would this resume me back to the level? What happens about FB in my dock when I switch back to it? Will it keep me signed in? When will it come off multitasking?
Argghhh! Sorry if I am being dull.
Shawn
Say I was playing Angry Birds and was halfway through a level and I wanted to check Facebook and then Safari for cinema times and then I wanted to resume my game of Angry Birds - would this resume me back to the level? What happens about FB in my dock when I switch back to it? Will it keep me signed in? When will it come off multitasking?
Argghhh! Sorry if I am being dull.
Shawn
TBH this is the best that can be done with out absolutely destroying the battery life, yes it not true multitasking but it will do what 99% of people assume is multitasking. i have no issues with it at all however i am a bit concerned about one thing, if i understand rite if you leave an app by returning to the home screen it closes, but if you double tap to get the bar it will then suspend or take advantage of the new services available from apple and disappear until called upon again via the bar.
there must be a limit to how many you can have suspended? i assume from them showing tomtom and music playing at the same time more than one Apple provided service can be run at the same time however i would have thought it would make sense for the OS to shut down automatically apps that have been suspended for more than 6 hours with out being used.
there must be a limit to how many you can have suspended? i assume from them showing tomtom and music playing at the same time more than one Apple provided service can be run at the same time however i would have thought it would make sense for the OS to shut down automatically apps that have been suspended for more than 6 hours with out being used.
You launch an app from homescreen, press the home button once to minimize it and go back to home screen, launch some other app, again minimize it to get to homescreen then go back to the first app you've already opened. You get what I am trying to say.
Icons of open apps could be marked or highlighted on homescreen, as a matter of fact there could be an option to automatically rearrange open apps if you prefer that way to see which ones are active. Also if you want to close an app just open it up, double tap home button to quit (instead of minimize) and get back to homescreen once again.
I think this makes more sense than Application Switch Dock.
That's a good point, you'd mostly (only?) be using the switcher for the few apps you were currently using so I guess you wouldn't be scrolling around too much down there if you can just get back to them from the springboard as normal. I think some people's concerns were maybe if you didn't go through the switcher that the app would relaunch instead of recovering its state. I didn't think it'd work that way though, and seems like you've experienced this to not be the case with the beta, which is good.
I'm still not too crazy about having the switcher get loaded down with a lot of icons though, just a slight compulsion with keeping things neat I guess.
I think you confused "you shouldn't have to use this" with "we're not putting this in."
Those 2 things are not the same thing at all.
You shouldn't NEED to press command-option-esc on a Mac, but it's built in just in case.
+1
For those who already have their hands on 4.0, can you still assign the double-tap home button function, or is it only for multitasking now? Personally, I like being able to get to my ipod that way, and probably wouldn't mind doing something else to bring up the background dock.
so let me make sure im understanding all of this correctly. im a "moderate" to "light" iphone user, so im not too concerned with multitasking. listed below are probably the only 2 instances where this multitasking would come in handy for someone like me, and please correct me if im understanding it wrong
1) let safari load a webpage in the background while i use another app (text, mail) in the foreground
2) let a music app like pandora or iheartradio run in the background while i use other apps
#1 is where im more confused. would safari continue to load a page if i clicked the home button to return to the home screen (or double click to bring up the app switcher) and open another app?
1) let safari load a webpage in the background while i use another app (text, mail) in the foreground
2) let a music app like pandora or iheartradio run in the background while i use other apps
#1 is where im more confused. would safari continue to load a page if i clicked the home button to return to the home screen (or double click to bring up the app switcher) and open another app?
