The reason was that Apple wanted to create a system that allowed developers to create apps that were as battery friendly as possible. They didn't want to end up with a device doing all sorts of useless work like updating graphics and getting realtime GPS or accelerometer data when an app isn't in the foreground app. So instead, they have a specific set of things that you are allowed to do in the "background", and one can presume, specific APIs to do each of them. After calling the given API, your app is likely put to sleep and the system handles the "background task". Having said that, I think that the business case to provide this feature before now was not all that strong, so that definitely contributed to the delay.
lol I didn't mean the "Genius" application, but "genius" as in "intelligence". The best and brightest at Apple, IMHO, have always been the people who work marketing over there. Some people have labeled Steve Jobs a "snake oil salesman", but, y'know what...it's kind of a compliment. Say what you will, that guy and his people can sell just about anything to folks out there. That's a helluva skill.
I don't necessarily buy the argument about battery life. The iPhone and iPod Touch devices have some of the worse battery life for any mobile device. On the other hand, it could've been even worse with multitasking which remains to be seen. Of course, with the iPad, multitasking is a must if its to be taken seriously as a mobile computing device, which I think is the real motive for why Apple finally gave in. Sure, you can keep hitting the home button, but that's pretty ridiculous when you think about it.
Well, if you read between the lines, they aren't doing real "multi-tasking" in the traditional sense. Seeing as how the OS is based on OSX, it would have been trivial to include it the normal way, so I'll take it at face value that they wanted to do something that wouldn't kill the user experience. They are right in that if you have some mis-behaving app using processor when it shouldn't, you'll start getting complaints about battery life, sluggish performance, etc. Given the number of people developing apps for the iphone, I think you can pretty much guarantee a large number of apps would be doing naughty things like that. Having run a Windows Mobile phone for awhile, the multi-tasking isn't all it's cracked up to be, especially when you are constrained for memory and processor resources. So, rather than just implement a general multi-tasking environment, they are only providing a set of very specific services that can be active in the background. Most likely these services will cover about 95% of what users want to do and maybe 25% of what developers want to do, but c'est la vie They are approaching this from a new direction, one that is less flexible, but in the end perhaps better in terms of the end user experience.
10:36AM "I can drag this around anywhere I want. I can have as many as I'd like. I can also put a folder in the dock." from here 10:38AM "You used to be able to see 180 apps on your phone, now it's over 2000."
can you add apps to more than one folder? and when you add one to a folder it disappears from springboard right
or at least add a few of us?.. Man I want folders so bad! And before everyone chimes in about JB'ng, I have a 3gs on the newest firmware out the box, there's nothing that can be done!
Yes but no one will as Apple would sue the asses off them if they gave the OS preview to anyone else. I think people should be banned or warned for requesting a copy of the os4 on this site, surely not legal anyway?
I would have expected that you could have a folder everywhere that you can currently have an app. 11 screens times 12 icons = 132. 132 times 16 = 2112. If you add 64 more for the dock icons, that is 2176. Meh...Apple math! Perhaps there are a couple of icons that can't be put in folders.
