Because the iOS doesn’t automatically excise inactive applications, the shelf contains every application you’ve run, but, unlike your Home screens, the apps aren’t in fixed locations. It’s less great when you want to switch to anything beyond the applications you’ve most recently been using. That’s great when you want to switch between a couple apps or, best of all, when you click a link in one application that, say, launches Safari. Tap on any of them and that app is brought to the foreground with a nifty “card-shuffling” animation. Apple arranges these icons by those that have most recently been in the foreground swipe from right to left, and the list continues with the next most recent applications, and so on, ad infinitum. Double-click the Home button and the entire screen slides up, presenting a “shelf” of four app icons. Unlike on Mac OS X, where the list of running apps appears as an overlay splashed across the screen, the iPhone method borrows more from the Mac OS’s interface for adding a Dashboard widget. Twitter, which has long had its own state-saving functionality- feels a lot less like multitasking, since you end up waiting for it to reload your data.Īs should be no surprise, Apple has tried to devise a multitasking system that feels like it fits within the iPhone’s existing user paradigms. Switching to an app that doesn’t support fast app switching-even one like At this point, however, the vast majority of apps in the App Store have not yet been updated to take advantage of fast app switching-it’s mainly limited to Apple’s own applications (and not even all of those-the recently releasedĪpple Store app doesn’t appear to support multitasking). That way, when you switch to another app, and then back to the first app, you’re instantly put back right where you left off, with no need for the app to reload any data. This is a neat bit of sleight-of-hand: what actually happens is that developer’s can now implement a way for an app to save its state-essentially to take a snapshot of exactly what you were doing when you left the app. The part of multitasking that most users will actually think of as multitasking was actually the seventh and final item on Apple’s list of multitasking frameworks: fast app switching. In my admittedly informal tests, multitasking in iOS 4 didn’t seem to drain my iPhone 3GS’s battery any faster than the previous version of the operating system, and I certainly wasn’t holding back on the multitasking. And because Apple’s built the background capabilities into the OS, rather than leaving it up to individual developers, the company’s take on multitasking lets users do multiple things at the same time without chewing through their phones’ battery life. (Arment’s post also presents a potential solution to this problem which I would be surprised if Apple didn’t implement at some point).įor many users, though, the iOS 4’s implementation of multitasking will be good enough. So if you’re hoping that iOS 4 means that your RSS reader or Twitter client will be able to download new content while in the background and present it to you when you switch to the app, you’re going to be disappointed. Pointed to one of the major gaps not addressed by iOS 4-the ability for applications to grab new data from the network while they’re in the background. For example, Instapaper developer Marco Arment The combination of these tasks presents a convincing simulacrum of the kind of multitasking you’ll find on a desktop computer, but there are holes in the functionality. The company’s preview of the new operating system back in April, it laid out seven specific types of tasks that could run in the background. As pedants will no doubt note, the iPhone’s multitasking is actually multitasking with an asterisk.
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