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RSSFoot, bullet, and maybe Apple is smarter than that?
People are going on and on about the lack of ability to do background processing in an iPhone app. Gruber counters the flow (and may be right), but I can’t help but wonder if maybe Apple has something else up their sleeve?
I may be out to lunch, but it’s possible that the iPhone’s TCP/IP stack (or its select equivalent) is able to hold connections open in an event-ish way. Really this is all that’s needed in most cases, some sort of continuity for applications like IM. Full background processing is a bad idea on a quality phone/mp3 player, but some sort of compromise may just do the trick.
Here’s hoping Apple has something like this in mind.
March 16th, 2008 at 2:22 am
“Full background processing is a bad idea on a quality phone/mp3 player…”
Yes - but the problem is that Apple has gone to the other extreme, and said no background processes. There are ways of managing background processes which don’t mean major performance impacts.
March 16th, 2008 at 9:23 am
Well, that’s what I’m suggesting: that some subset of the event portions of background processing may already be in the works (it’s at least one way to solve the problem). If you boil down what background tasks are used for, maybe there’s a more manageable subset that could be implemented without full background process support. I can imagine a few ways at least.
To contrast, though, the Wii doesn’t allow background tasks, and the iPhone/Touch are really equivalent tools. It’s hard to provide everything in a device, and make it great.