Sorry people, I did not make a 'live link' for the TidBITS explanation in my previous email, so have reset it :-(
Hi Glenn, How Mobile Multitasking Works The major new feature of Apple’s latest mobile operating system, iOS 4, is multitasking. How you use it: When you press the Home button twice, Apple’s iOS 4 displays a “drawer” allowing you to switch between apps. The drawer shows your most recently used apps. This is similar to the “alt-tab” functionality we’re accustomed to on traditional PCs. What’s going on: When you leave an app in iOS 4, it’s not actually closing (unlike previous versions of the OS). Instead, it’s going into frozen, suspended animation, sitting inertly in the background. So when you relaunch an app, it opens instantly to pick up from where it left off before you “closed” it. That behavior allows you to switch between apps very quickly — a feature called Fast App Switching, which is the core functionality of Apple’s iOS multitasking. (TidBITS has an excellent in-depth explanation of Fast App Switching.) Fast App Switching isn’t all iOS 4 multitasking does, as there are a few exceptions for specific types of apps. Apple allows apps that play audio, connect with voice-over-IP or use location detection to run quietly in the background while one thread is still active. So that’s why, for example, you can leave the Pandora app, and the music will still be playing in the background while you check your e-mail. Likewise, you can leave Skype while on a VoIP call, and you won’t hang up on your buddy while you’re browsing Safari, for example. Third, you can leave a mapping app or a fitness tracker like RunKepper and come back to it, and it’ll still have a lock on your location. It’s up to third-party app developers, of course, to tell their apps to behave this way with the new iOS 4 software development kit. Another sort of background activity iOS supports is push notifications, which keeps a specific internet port active while the iPhone is in hibernation, so you can receive e-mails, instant messages and alerts even when the screen is off. These alerts pop up on the screen in the same way as SMS on the iPhone. WIRED Fast App Switching is indeed fast and stylish, avoids draining battery. All apps are constantly running inertly, so you can quickly switch between them all. TIRED Only allows a single application thread to continue running; only certain kinds of activities are allowed to run in the background. Push notifications scream for your attention at the center of the screen. Cheers, Ronni 17" MacBook Pro Intel Core i7 2.66GHz / 4GB / 1067 MHz DDR3 / 500GB Serial ATA Drive @ 7200rpm OS X 10.6.3 Snow Leopard Windows 7 Ultimate (under sufferance) On 13/09/2010, at 11:16 AM, Glenn Nicholas wrote: > > Quick note here (maybe someone knows how to avoid this issue?) > > My iPhone4 (running iOS 4.0.2) stopped working on the weekend. There > was plenty of charge (60% it later turned out), but I just had a black > screen, no response to on/off and no response to being plugged in to > charger. > > A visit to the Apple Store and talking to a genius solved the problem. > 1. When you open an app (built in or 3rd party) it stays open - this > uses up some memory > 2. Over time - if you don't shut down apps manually - the iPhone runs > out of memory and won't respond > > The solution: > - double tap home button to see list of apps that are open > - tap and hold one of them to put them in to edit mode > - tap the red minus icon to switch off apps > > It seems apps will stay running (multitasking) until you manually > switch them off. > > > Glenn Nicholas > OM4 :: > -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml> Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> Unsubscribe - <mailto:wamug-unsubscr...@wamug.org.au>
