Boy Genius: Multitasking, new interface in iPhone 4.0

I have multitasking via Jailbreak and Backgrounder. I only ever use it with Pandora, but it's a better user experience than before.

The reason I jailbroke mine in the first place was for app organization. I have categories which creates "folders" to organize apps, and appflow which allows you to thumb through all of your apps using a coverflow interface. Spotlight is great and all, but it's usefullness is rather limited.

I'm not too keen on the assumption that multitasking is something 'users have wanted for a long time'. Some users, perhaps, but personally I'd far rather prioritise battery life over the ability to have multiple apps running in the background. Push notifications seem to do the trick perfectly well for most instances where background stuff is needed (where developers have actually used them; come on, Skype) and they use up very little extra battery. Not only that but it keeps the interface cleaner if you don't have the complication of having to keep track of multiple running apps. This is only a smartphone after all, not a full-blown computer.

New ways to multi-task? Sorry, still no background "apps".

Apps may be able to register a task to be called periodically, but those tasks probably would not (and should not) have direct access to the radios for 3G and GPS.

Think instead of queuing up requests that are handled as a group on a user-defined schedule, thus minimizing the amount of time the radios are on and drawing power.

I'd also see them allowing the "music" sound queue to be fed by another registered background task. Again, a task, not the full app.

And you could also allow developers to hook into the clock/alarm system with wakeup notifications that are app specific.

Finally, I could also see a background "shutdown" task that could be registered to allow photo apps and the like to continue to save files or save state when they quit.

That would handle 95% of the needs for app notifications, gps tracking, and music streaming, without letting apps run wild and killing battery life.

This is all well and good but can they make the email part sucka little less?

i love my iphone but the email pales in comparison to blackberry. no unifoed mailbox? is it 1997 out thre??

pffft I already have multi tasking on my iphone.... its called jailbreak+backgrounder :)

I consider there to be two very different needs to multitasking and the implementation should distinguish between them. The most important is having an app background itself when a call comes in. This is important both for apps such as VOIP (where you don't want an incoming GSM call to disconnect you even if you decline the call) and navigation. The second is merely having an app background itself rather than quit when you return to Springboard or launch a second app. While this is also useful in many instances, it presents more of an opportunity for forgetting to quit and continuing to consume cycles/memory.

I'd love for backgrounding to be configurable, with apps disallowed from backgrounding, allowed only to prevent quitting on incoming call and allowed arbitrarily.

I'm guessing 3rd-party multitasking will only be available on devices with 256 MB of RAM or more.

Having come from Windows Mobile, true multitasking is actually second from bottom on my list of not-wants for iPhone (above, though quite far away from, Flash). My hope/prediction: multitasking will be limited to a fraction of available memory/processing, with user's choice of what's allowed to run in background (turned off by default), and will limited to an enhanced form of JavaScript much like Dashboard Widgets.

This is getting too interesting! But I want a MacBook Pro update over anything else!
If they don't present it on the 27th I'll have to wait a least 3 weeks after then... which sucks!

This is the only problem with the days leading up to a announcement from Apple; ENDLESS speculation, rumors, and hype. As always, I don't believe anything until El Jobso says so.