Nonfocussed Personal Blog

No essay here, just a response to "Why the iPad may never need multitasking", so let's just get to the point: I agree that the iPhone does not need multitasking.

What do you want multitasking for? You might be a road warrior, needing to get access to that Numbers sheet while composing an email. You might be like me - using b.iCycle to record a bike trip. You might want to use Skype, but in the middle of a call you want to take a picture to email to your contact.

In none of these cases would multitasking really solve the problem. Having a Numbers reader running in the background will chew up battery power. Having b.iCycle running in the background isn't really going to solve my problem of battery consumption by the screen which is continually lit since b.iCycle turns off sleep. Having Skype running as a background application isn't necessarily going to help, thanks to context switches and the graphics being updated when nobody's looking.

What I'd like to see on the iPhone are background tasks and caching.

For example in the Numbers + email case, Numbers could cache the document in faster memory so that switch times (from Mail, go Home, then open Numbers with the most recent document visible, read or copy the detail of interest, go Home, then open Mail and continue writing) could be reduced. Rather than waiting for the whole application to be loaded into memory from the flash, it could be temporarily cached in fast RAM. I'm told that the iPad is much faster to use than the iPhone, so perhaps this won't be needed in future models.

As for background tasks, I could save battery power if b.iCycle was able to launch a "GPS track recorder" background app, and attach to that only when the iPhone is awake with b.iCycle as the current application. The rest of the time the background app uses no UI, and can keep running even when the screen is turned off. I can get more than three hours of GPS track recorded on one charge as it stands - it wouldn't surprise me to find that most of the power drain is due to the backlight on the screen.

What about Skype? It would be nice for a background app to be able to take control of the audio i/o (including the volume control rocker), releasing the screen for other apps to use. The Skype call could run in the background (the daemon being responsible only for audio i/o, encoding outbound, decoding inbound, and that's it) while I go about my business of taking a photo and emailing it to my friend - just the same way GSM phone calls work right now.

I'd like to see more ability to communicate with the user without being the active application such as via a scheduled notification service, which would allow applications to present alerts (similar to current alarms or SMS notices), update badges (such as missed calls) and change icons (such as the Calendar updating the date on its icon).

I don't believe we need multitasking at all. That's just a complaint from a few people who are determined to make an iPhone behave exactly as badly as a desktop computer.