[Cialug] iPhone Apps Will Not Offer Multitasking

[Bill Davis]

On 3/12/08, Nathan Smith <nathan.smith at ipmvs.com> wrote:

>
> http://www.brighthand.com/default.asp?newsID=13866
>
> I thought this was interesting.  Maybe somebody who knows embedded systems
> could speculatively comment:   Is this because the threading or memory
> management that would be required for the applications to run simultaneously
> is too hard to do or would "break" the phone in other respects - such as
> diminishing responsiveness for phone calls or wrecking responsive user
> interfaces like precious coverflow?



 As I understand it, it's because (a) Apple is worried about a third party
app interfering with responsiveness for phone calls (a VERY valid worry,
let's face it - this IS a phone first and foremost!) and perhaps (b) because
they just didn't have time to allow that in the first release of the SDK.
They also make sure each app runs in it's own "sandbox" and can't affect
other apps on the phone, apparently for the same sort of reason.   You talk
to other apps like the address book, web browser, etc, through code
frameworks.  Not sure if 3rd party apps can expose a framework for others to
access or not; haven't read much of the SDK yet.

They originally were NOT going to allow third party development on the
iPhone at all except as web apps, but their developer community screamed
bloody murder and the hackers figured out how to do it anyway in just a few
weeks...so they gave in.   (When will corporations learn? Never,
apparently.)

The 100,000 developers who have downloaded the SDK in the last week are NOT
happy about this some of the restrictions in the SDK (including
multitasking) , and the petitions have started already.

 Thwap Apple upside the head enough, and they eventually get the message,
though.  I don't expect this to stand, though we may have to wait until OS
3.0  ;-)

Also, it really doesn't matter...the iPhone hackers have already hacked
("Jailbroken") the 2.0 OS while it's still in beta, and unlike the official
apps, the apps written with the hacker's SDK in the 1.x and 2.x OS _do_
allow multitasking and they've long since had their own very nice
over-the-air installer and repository ("Store").  Someone wrote a "LoJack"
app that runs in the background, I've heard, so you can wipe your phone if
it gets lost or stolen.   And the hacker's SDK has access to the whole file
system and stuff.  Plus apparently it will have access to all the "offical"
OS 2.0 goodness too.    If you're brave enough to install the hacker stuff,
that is.  I'm not sure it's worth it for most folks, but at least the option
is there.  There's even a book from O'Reilly (I think) on iPhone Open
Software Development methods coming out.   So far, they've been able to find
a way around Apple's security fixes that they're hacking in
through...several times even before Apple officially released an OS update!
And they usually have several backup hacks, just in case, that they dont'
tell Apple about.

Now if they didn't have to use Objective-C for their development.  I dislike
that dialect.  I find the code very hard to read.  But it's the same
language used for Mac OS X development (and perhaps you can use other
languages as well, eventually....certainly you seem to be able to do so with
the hacker's SDK...you can install pretty much any Unixy app, especially
command line ones.)

References:

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2008/03/iphone_toolkits_complementary.html

http://code.google.com/p/independence/

and lots of iPhone projects on Google Code:

http://code.google.com/hosting/search?q=iphone



> --
> Bill Davis
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