Amongst other things, Multitasking is one of the things that Steve Jobs just unveiled for the iPhone OS 4.0. The pain point that Steve pointed out is that multitasking drains battery life, reduces performance and makes the experience sluggish. Quite fair, I say! So how is Apple tackling this?
“We figured out how to implement multitasking for third party apps and avoid those things. So that’s what took so long. I’d like to demo it. We have a great UI.”
The dock at the bottom of the screen that houses favorite apps shows up the background apps on double clicking the iPhone home button (as rumored, but no Expose like UI it seems.)
The seven multitasking API’s provided to developers in OS 4.0 would be:
- background audio streaming
- VOIP – Slype running in background demoed
- background location (with more privacy settings for location services)
- Push notification
- Local Notifications (without any server pinging)
- Task completion
- Fast app switching
