Re: [CGUYS] ipad/iphone/ipod touch and the lack of multitasking explained
Safari has always worked pretty well on my Touch, it's only crashed once that I can remember. On my laptop the flash plugin will crash sometimes, but I almost never need it and will continue to surf on with a lot fewer annoying ads. Could you give us some examples of some sites that crash Safari for iPod for you? I tried out an iPad in Best Buy yesterday, and I have to say that I was impressed. It is more evolved and polished than many third- or fourth- generation products, even some of Apple's. The iPad is amazingly fast and responsive. Apps explode into existence when you launch them. In Safari, web pages load as quickly as they do on my laptop at home, where I have a fast connection. The video feature of the New York Times main page works without flash (yay!). Touch and gestures are fast and accurate. I thought I had a good idea of what to expect from my experience with the iPod Touch that I've had since September, but I was wrong. From:b_s-wilk b1sun...@yahoo.es Subject: Re: ipad/iphone/ipod touch and the lack of multitasking explained The only app that crashes consistently on my iPod Touch is Safari. One other app crashed twice, iTunes crashed, but that's nothing compared to Safari. If Apple can't get its own apps to run, no wonder they're paranoid about third party developers. When iPad gets beyond 1.0 it might be more compelling, but I have enough tech toys and low-tech methods that work better for me. * ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *
Re: [CGUYS] ipad/iphone/ipod touch and the lack of multitasking explained
Is the iPad a first gen device? It's hard to say it's any different than a very large ipod touch isn't it? On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 8:46 AM, David K Watson davidkirkwat...@gmail.comwrote: I tried out an iPad in Best Buy yesterday, and I have to say that I was impressed. It is more evolved and polished than many third- or fourth- generation products, even some of Apple's. The iPad is amazingly fast and responsive. Apps explode into existence when you launch them. In Safari, web pages load as quickly as they do on my laptop at home, where I have a fast connection. The video feature of the New York Times main page works without flash (yay!). Touch and gestures are fast and accurate. I thought I had a good idea of what to expect from my experience with the iPod Touch that I've had since September, but I was wrong. From:b_s-wilk b1sun...@yahoo.es Subject: Re: ipad/iphone/ipod touch and the lack of multitasking explained The only app that crashes consistently on my iPod Touch is Safari. One other app crashed twice, iTunes crashed, but that's nothing compared to Safari. If Apple can't get its own apps to run, no wonder they're paranoid about third party developers. When iPad gets beyond 1.0 it might be more compelling, but I have enough tech toys and low-tech methods that work better for me. * ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** * * ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *
Re: [CGUYS] ipad/iphone/ipod touch and the lack of multitasking explained
It is like some of the movies that are done. it is a first gen product of a 3rd gen product of another product. So who knows. Stewart At 10:58 AM 4/7/2010, you wrote: Is the iPad a first gen device? It's hard to say it's any different than a very large ipod touch isn't it? On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 8:46 AM, David K Watson davidkirkwat...@gmail.comwrote: I tried out an iPad in Best Buy yesterday, and I have to say that I was impressed. It is more evolved and polished than many third- or fourth- generation products, even some of Apple's. The iPad is amazingly fast and responsive. Apps explode into existence when you launch them. In Safari, web pages load as quickly as they do on my laptop at home, where I have a fast connection. The video feature of the New York Times main page works without flash (yay!). Touch and gestures are fast and accurate. I thought I had a good idea of what to expect from my experience with the iPod Touch that I've had since September, but I was wrong. * ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *
Re: [CGUYS] ipad/iphone/ipod touch and the lack of multitasking explained
Nice article, but I don't entirely buy it. First, just because the iPad has plenty of processing power and battery capacity and Apple may add more multitasking in a future OS release, this doesn't make a straw man out of Apple's argument that third party multitasking is a hamper to stability and a drain on the battery. An app that repeatedly crashes and restarts is obviously unstable and will certainly drain the battery faster, for example. Also, the OS was initially designed for iPhones, which do have some battery issues, and while the iPad does have a honking big battery, you still want it to last as long as possible(especially since it is going to be compared to the Kindle and Nook). The fact that iP* devices have limited RAM and no swap is also true and another good reason for the limited multitasking, but its misleading to suggest that they don't have swap because they don't have hard drives. For example, there are plenty of implementations of linux on a flash drive which plainly use a portion of the flash drive for swap space. And you can easily find guides for enabling virtual memory on jailbroken iphones. The Bundles method of implementing multitasking on Android sounds exactly like the way most iPhone OS apps already work, with the exception that Apple doesn't yet let non-Apple apps run in the background. In the Android OS, apps that were the least recently used get killed, so they then aren't really multitasking most of the time either. Like on the iPhone, when they are wanted again, they reopen to their previously saved state. It's not going out on a limb to suggest that when Apple updates the iPhone OS to accommodate multitasking (or to strengthen the appearance of multitasking), it's will be some elaboration of this scheme, and apps will have to meet some pretty stringent requirements before they are allowed to multitask. We'll find out soon, Apple is going to preview the next iPhone OS thursday. On Apr 4, 2010, at 6:13 PM, COMPUTERGUYS-L automatic digest system wrote: From:mike xha...@gmail.com Subject: ipad/iphone/ipod touch and the lack of multitasking explained Kinda long for our list, but seemed short enough to post here in full. A good editorial about why the Apple family of pods don't multitask. http://blog.rlove.org/2010/04/why-ipad-and-iphone-dont-support.html?utm_sou= rce=3Dfeedburnerutm_medium=3Dfeedutm_campaign=3DFeed%3A+rlove+%28Robert+L= ove%29utm_content=3DGoogle+Reader *Why don't the iPad and iPhone support multitasking? The answer isn't what you think.* * ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *
Re: [CGUYS] ipad/iphone/ipod touch and the lack of multitasking explained
Nice article, but I don't entirely buy it. First, just because the iPad has plenty of processing power and battery capacity and Apple may add more multitasking in a future OS release, this doesn't make a straw man out of Apple's argument that third party multitasking is a hamper to stability and a drain on the battery. An app that repeatedly crashes and restarts is obviously unstable and will certainly drain the battery faster, for example. Also, the OS was initially designed for iPhones, which do have some battery issues, and while the iPad does have a honking big battery, you still want it to last as long as possible(especially since it is going to be compared to the Kindle and Nook). The only app that crashes consistently on my iPod Touch is Safari. One other app crashed twice, iTunes crashed, but that's nothing compared to Safari. If Apple can't get its own apps to run, no wonder they're paranoid about third party developers. When iPad gets beyond 1.0 it might be more compelling, but I have enough tech toys and low-tech methods that work better for me. * ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *
Re: [CGUYS] ipad/iphone/ipod touch and the lack of multitasking explained
... Apple's argument that third party multitasking is a hamper to stability ... Well, multitasking third-party apps certainly shouldn't be a hamper to the stability of a well-designed multitasking OS. (Now, before certain people get all bent out of shape because I'm saying that the iPad OS isn't well-designed, that is not what I'm saying. I'm not saying anything about the iPad OS. My point is that this claim doesn't wash.) * ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *
[CGUYS] ipad/iphone/ipod touch and the lack of multitasking explained
Kinda long for our list, but seemed short enough to post here in full. A good editorial about why the Apple family of pods don't multitask. http://blog.rlove.org/2010/04/why-ipad-and-iphone-dont-support.html?utm_source=feedburnerutm_medium=feedutm_campaign=Feed%3A+rlove+%28Robert+Love%29utm_content=Google+Reader *Why don't the iPad and iPhone support multitasking? The answer isn't what you think.* *There is a lot of misconception around support for multitasking in the iPhone http://www.apple.com/iphone/ and its giant cousin, the iPadhttp://www.apple.com/ipad/. What follows is my analysis of the situation. I am not privy to any insider Apple information. Moreover, while my knowledge is certainly colored by my work on Android http://www.android.com/, I’m not drawing a comparison or using any Google-specific knowledge.* *First, obviously the iPhone and the iPad **do support multitasking. This is 2010 and both are built on modern, powerful operating systems that provide support for preemptive multitasking. Indeed, at the system level, there are many processes running concurrently. And some Apple-provided applications, such as the music player, clearly multitask.* *So let’s redefine the complaint. What in actuality is not supported is the ability for third-party applications to multitask. That is, the system enforces a policy whereby once an application leaves the foreground, it terminates. In some ways, this makes sense. The iPad and iPhone user interfaces are single window, single document. Not allowing for background applications probably works out for a whole lot of use cases.* *Apple says they do not support multitasking because it is a hamper to stability and a drain on battery life. That clearly isn’t true—the iPad has plenty of processing power and battery capacity. Rumor is that Apple is going to add multitasking in a future OS release. This rumor likely **is true. Is Apple somehow going to make background applications not consume any battery? Of course not. These excuses are straw men.* *The real reason that the iPad and iPhone do not allow third-party applications to multitask is likely more complex, more technical. Bear with me here. Both the iPad and iPhone, as mobile devices, have limited memory (256MB in the current incarnations) and no hard drive. No hard drive means no swap file. Limited memory and no swap imply that applications have a small, fixed amount of memory at their disposal. They don’t have the luxury of seemingly-infinite memory, as a modern system with swap has. Memory consumption is thus a critical system constraint. Like most systems, the iPad and iPhone deal with this by killing applications that use too much memory via a mechanism called the out of memory (OOM) killer. Unlike most systems, applications designed for the iPad and iPhone know how much memory they have at their disposal, and are designed to operate within those constraints. This is classic memory management in embedded programming. No swap, fixed memory, you deal.* *What would happen if third-party applications could multitask? Some number of applications would be in the background. But each application was written presuming it had access to some fixed amount of memory. Thus, if the background applications consumed too much memory, the operating system would have to kill them. But the user would expect that he or she could switch back to an old application, and it would still be running where it was left. He or she certainly doesn’t expect applications to just die every time a new application is run, losing state and even data.* *Simply put, the reason the iPad and iPhone do not support multitasking is because it is hard to allow multitasking in a system with no swap and a limited amount of memory. Apple could enable multitasking—indeed, there is no reason that the devices couldn’t support it right now, with a one or two line code change—but your applications would constantly be killed. That isn’t a very useful feature.* *So how is Apple going to enable support for multitasking? Likely similar to how Android allows it. The Android platform was designed from the ground up for use on phones and other embedded devices. Consequently, we built in a mechanism whereby applications can save their state, including their current view, with the system. In fact, through this state saving mechanism, which we call Bundleshttp://blog.rlove.org/2010/04/%E2%80%9Dhttp://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/Bundle.html%E2%80%9C, Android applications can operate as if they are stateless.* *Thus, allowing for multitasking on Android is easy. Like the iPad and iPhone, we have a powerful, modern operating system (in Android’s case, based on the Linux kernel). Unlike the iPad and iPhone, we also have Bundles, which allow apps to save their state. Android’s OOM killer is aware of background applications and is capable of killing them in least-recently-used order. If the user switches back to an application that has been
Re: [CGUYS] ipad/iphone/ipod touch and the lack of multitasking explained
On Apr 4, 2010, at 2:37 PM, mike wrote: Kinda long for our list, but seemed short enough to post here in full. A good editorial about why the Apple family of pods don't multitask. Makes good sense. Thank you for posting. * ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *
Re: [CGUYS] ipad/iphone/ipod touch and the lack of multitasking explained
On Sun, Apr 4, 2010 at 5:16 PM, tjpa t...@tjpa.com wrote: On Apr 4, 2010, at 2:37 PM, mike wrote: Kinda long for our list, but seemed short enough to post here in full. A good editorial about why the Apple family of pods don't multitask. Makes good sense. Thank you for posting. It is being mentioned by a number of folks who have been reviewing the iPad that it begins to appear as though that new device is going to particularly catch on with the younger set, pre-teens and upwards. A new drain on family budgets if that pans out. Gotta have that social networking thing, you know, not to mention the games. Dunno if Apple planned it that way, but if such a scenario transpires, what a way to inculcate flocks of youngsters into the Apple World... iPhones, iPods, iPads, and who knows what will be next. Maybe, slim chance, but just maybe youngsters will actually use the devices intelligently. Steve * ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *
Re: [CGUYS] ipad/iphone/ipod touch and the lack of multitasking explained
Most of the reviews I have read so far are referring to it as another device. Not to replace anything but to have. Not revolutionary maybe evolutionary. By the way saw the neatest bumper sticker yesterday. If evolution gets outlawed only outlaws will evolve. Stewart At 06:46 PM 4/4/2010, you wrote: It is being mentioned by a number of folks who have been reviewing the iPad that it begins to appear as though that new device is going to particularly catch on with the younger set, pre-teens and upwards. A new drain on family budgets if that pans out. Gotta have that social networking thing, you know, not to mention the games. Dunno if Apple planned it that way, but if such a scenario transpires, what a way to inculcate flocks of youngsters into the Apple World... iPhones, iPods, iPads, and who knows what will be next. Maybe, slim chance, but just maybe youngsters will actually use the devices intelligently. Steve * ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *
Re: [CGUYS] ipad/iphone/ipod touch and the lack of multitasking explained
On Sun, Apr 4, 2010 at 7:56 PM, Stewart Marshall revsamarsh...@earthlink.net wrote: Most of the reviews I have read so far are referring to it as another device. Not to replace anything but to have. Some reviewers are saying it may supplant the laptop as we have come to know it. Not revolutionary maybe evolutionary. Sure, it is most certainly evolutionary, but a number of reviews refer to it as revolutionary. Perhaps the term revolutionary has become so overused as to have lost its meaning, as per the abominably overused descriptive word, hero. Steve * ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *
Re: [CGUYS] ipad/iphone/ipod touch and the lack of multitasking explained
Gotta have that social networking thing, you know, not to mention the games. Dunno if Apple planned it that way, but if such a scenario transpires, what a way to inculcate flocks of youngsters into the Apple World... iPhones, iPods, iPads, and who knows what will be next. Maybe, slim chance, but just maybe youngsters will actually use the devices intelligently. When the 3G version comes out, it could change the entire mobile phone pricing system. Whether the iPad is successful or not, being able to get cheaper data plans independent of cellular contracts is definitely a big plus. T-Mobile increased the number of minutes for voice service by 40% but they have data-only plans on one device, just as ATT has its new data plans for iPad only. It would be better if we could get any plan we want instead of plans being device-specific. Can the new SIM card fit in other current mobile phones? What is ATT doing, other than using a different SIM card, to prevent getting the iPad SIM and using it in an unlocked cell phone [especially one that multitasks]? * ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *
