Why the iPad and the iPhone don't support multitasking
blog.rlove.org
Why the iPad and the iPhone don't support multitasking
1–10 of 65 posts
Re: Why the iPad and the iPhone don't support multitasking
#2> "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."
He loses me here. My iPhone has a 32GB SSD hard drive. Sounds like a perfect medium for swap space to me...
Re: Why the iPad and the iPhone don't support multitasking
#3> "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." He loses me here. My iPhone has a 32GB SSD hard drive. Sounds like a perfect medium for swap space to me...
Yeah, that's poor wording.
The techie in me was aghast at the idea of Apple shipping iPhones with a full Unixy kernel but with no swap (and minimal background processing -- and for that matter, I wondered why its Objective-C runtime didn't support garbage collection) until I actually laid hands on one and realized how fluid things can be when they don't stutter and stop randomly while swapping in parts of the foreground program.
Such jerkiness gives a feel of "computeriness" to the user when running desktop OSes, breaking the feeling of fluid interactivity that one gets with a "real-world" object. It also causes a lot of user anxiety and even errors: it becomes a normal part of the experience to click on an item and then have a second or two of wondering whether the app "heard" you or not. Often followed by more clicks, which end up being misinterpreted when the app finally gets to run again, and now the user's mental model is completely out of sync with the system's state.
In the physical world, you never flick a real switch on a panel and then it actually moves a second or two later!
Re: Why the iPad and the iPhone don't support multitasking
#4And in practice, its still wrong. The 3rd party repos have an app called Backgrounding that does precisely that... And no sdlowdown on most apps.
Re: Why the iPad and the iPhone don't support multitasking
#5> "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." He loses me here. My iPhone has a 32GB SSD hard drive. Sounds like a perfect medium for swap space to me...
Swapping has been demonstrated to be seriously detrimental to the life expectancy of solid state drives.
Re: Why the iPad and the iPhone don't support multitasking
#6This guy is just wrong: Apple OS has turned off multitasking for 3rd party apps to maintain battery life.
It fully supports it. This is a control situation, where Apple has decided "We want our devices to have good battery life more than we want to allow multitasking".
Re: Why the iPad and the iPhone don't support multitasking
#7This guy is just wrong: Apple OS has turned off multitasking for 3rd party apps to maintain battery life. It fully supports it. This is a control situation, where Apple has decided "We want our devices to have good battery life more than we want to allow multitasking".
Source?
Re: Why the iPad and the iPhone don't support multitasking
#8And in practice, its still wrong. The 3rd party repos have an app called Backgrounding that does precisely that... And no sdlowdown on most apps.
It's very handy. Sometimes you want to have Safari start loading a slow-to-load page, put it in the background and do something else. Pandora radio is another oft cited example.
Re: Why the iPad and the iPhone don't support multitasking
#9This guy is just wrong: Apple OS has turned off multitasking for 3rd party apps to maintain battery life. It fully supports it. This is a control situation, where Apple has decided "We want our devices to have good battery life more than we want to allow multitasking".
Best thing about those excuses are:
Every other mobile OS supports multitasking and all the smartphones i know have similar battery life. Symbian, Windows, Android, all have multitasking and yet people try to convince me that it, "not needed", "not possible", "makes the device unstable", "drains battery too much" which is just not true. My Android phone lasts at least as long as an iphone and i use multitasking all the day. It's just that the OS was truly made for this and it does it quite well.
Re: Why the iPad and the iPhone don't support multitasking
#10[deleted]