The iPhone OS 4 event was earlier this week. Tonight I finally got a chance to sit down and watch the video. There were just a few items you had to see to really appreciate. Among the quoted 100+ new features, I have three favorites. And I think they might surprise you. I’ll start with the obvious one.
Apple has getting bashed over the head by the lack of third-party multitasking. Its one of those one-word nuggets that a competitor can latch on to and repeat till the average consumer thinks about it – whether it’s accurate or not. If the concept is foreign to you, click your Dock icon to switch to another program and the select Hide from its menu. You didn’t have to quit it and reopen it. On an iPhone as soon as you return to the home screen, most likely your app is quit.
I applauded Apple for finally showing off the fact that while on a call you can still access data. Although this is an AT&T feature, it’s still multitasking that iPhone can do and Palm Pre on Sprint (et al) cannot. I listen to iTunes on the phone while reading emails all day long… but the claims are not baseless: third party apps cannot run concurrently.
My experience with troubleshooting Mac makes me glad that Apple took their time on this one, despite the slander. Too often we see a background app lock up the whole system. It’s less common this decade but it still happens, requiring a trip to Activity Monitor or ssh to kill it. On a computer that’s one thing but on a phone, especially when on a call – not good.
Credit goes to Kent Stones for really nailing the point – Apple took their sweet time with copy/paste on the iPhone and when they finally got it, they made a nearly flawless implementation. (SJ said the same thing almost verbatim in the video.)
Rather than just letting an app sit in the background and do what ever it wants – which is what Palm, Android, and the rest do – all the while consuming memory, draining the battery, and making things sluggish, Apple took a look at what an app would need – and seeing as how they approve every app, they know exactly what each one does and needs – and created seven ways for an app to sit behind the scenes and do exclusively the basic things it needs to do back there.
Most commonly an app that’s sent to the background will merely pause and consume zero resources, but instantly open back up and resume where it left off. Some apps like Pandora that stream music will function just like the iPod function. Programs that simply need time to process or upload or other work can now do so while you do other things, and pause when they’re done. Apps that need to stay open and listen for events, like incoming messages, or checking GPS locations, or sending reminders to the users can do so without having the full app running and eating resources.
Even the way you switch apps is very easy: double-tap the home button and a row at the very bottom appears allowing you the thumb through your open and paused apps. Simple. And like just about every iPhone user who not only hates to wait, but is also sick and tired of hearing knockoffs like Android and Palm talk about “multitasking,” I’m very much looking forward to this.
My second favorite “feature” is one that a lot of people scoffed at: iAd. (And yes iEverything is starting to become a problem, especially when the new iAds are so close to the new iPad. But I digress.) Right now a lot of free and low cost apps on the App Store are subsidized by a small banner ad. It’s often a miniature version of a banner ad on a website. When you touch it, you leave your app and fly off to a webpage to see the rest. iAd changes all that.
I can’t possibly do it justice in this space, but it feels less like a web banner ad and more like a cross between a TV commercial and extra content on a DVD, complete with freebie downloads, store locators in Maps, and direct purchasing.
Why do I like a “crummy commercial”? For one, it’s innovative; I’ve never seen any advertisement like it. These ads position Apple as a leader in mobile advertising, putting them way ahead of Google in the same space. And while the estimated potential revenues for Apple (a 40% cut of the total gross off the ads) won’t supplant the Mac or iTunes/iPod, Turnabout is fair play: if Google wants to get into mobile phones to compete with Apple, then Apple can go right to the heart of Google’s mobile ad ventures.
But what I like most about iAd is that 60% of the gross goes to the developers on the App Store which in turns means more and more great programs on the platform…. which means more iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad sales… which means more advertising opportunities… more iAds… more apps… rinse, repeat.
My third favorite item is not one of the 7 “tent pole” features they touted in the presentation. In fact, SJ didn’t even talk about this one; it was a blob of text in his Keynote presentation.
CardDAV support.
That’s the technology behind the Address Book Server in Snow Leopard Server which has been an egregious omission from the iPhone over the past year. I’m hoping this is merely the tip of the iceberg for tighter integration between Server and iPhone. That gap may be the biggest mistake that Apple has made since the iPhone’s release. And if they close the gap with iPhone OS 4, that extends the success of that platform to the Mac as well.
None of us Mac die-hards want to see the Mac become the second fiddle to the iDevices, as nice as they are. The Mac needs to be the flagship; not the other way around. And if iAds and iPhones and iTunes and iPod can really – not just halo effect – but really translate into more Macs and Mac Servers (as the missing piece of the puzzle for the PC-based company that loves their new iPhones) then I’m all for that.
Posted by brian on Apr 11, 2010 in Blog, Uncategorized | Comments Off
