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IPhone 4 and the list of new features is massive: There's multitasking (finally!), a refreshed interface, and literally hundreds of other changes, all coming this summer. Here's the rundown.The new OS will ship in June (Fall for iPad, and a developer preview is available today, so we can expect to have plenty of apps updated and ready for launch.Multitasking: Multitasking is limited to audio streaming, VoIP and GPS apps, as well as a few other allowances: they can finish specific, important tasks in the background, for example. As far as non-music/nav/VoIP apps, those can be suspended in the background, but not left running. It's here, finally. It's handled with a simple task switcher: double click your home button, and you get a list of running apps. Select, switch, done. With iPhone 4's multitasking, most apps aren't actually running in the background—just certain functions of the app, like an audio stream or a GPS lock.
Local notifications: Notifications can be sent between apps on the phone, not just from remote servers. In other words, if something important happens in an app you've opened and moved away from, a notification will pop up in whatever app you're using at the time, effectively saying "switch back to me!" It's a fairly clever way to keep track of multiple apps without the need for a start bar or dock-type interface.But! All apps can now be frozen, in full, so that when you reopen them, they're restored to exactly the state they were in when they were closed. From Apple's dev guidelines:iPhone OS 4's new multitasking offers users a new way to quickly move between apps, and provides developers seven new multitasking services to easily add multitasking features to their apps. These services include background audio, so apps like Pandora can play music in the background, and VoIP, so VoIP apps can receive a VoIP call even when the iPhone is asleep or the user is running other apps.
iPhone OS 4 provides multitasking to third party apps while preserving battery life and foreground app performance, which has until now proved elusive on mobile devices.An application can request a finite amount of time to complete some important task. An application can use local notifications to generate user alerts at designated times, whether or not the application is running.Folders help users better organize and quickly access their apps.An application can declare itself as supporting specific services that require regular background execution time. Simply drag one app icon onto another, and a new folder is automatically created. The folder is automatically given a name based on the App Store category of that app, such as "Games," which the user can easily rename. Using folders, users can now organize and access over 2,000 apps on their iPhone.
Local notifications: Notifications can be sent between apps on the phone, not just from remote servers. In other words, if something important happens in an app you've opened and moved away from, a notification will pop up in whatever app you're using at the time, effectively saying "switch back to me!" It's a fairly clever way to keep track of multiple apps without the need for a start bar or dock-type interface.But! All apps can now be frozen, in full, so that when you reopen them, they're restored to exactly the state they were in when they were closed. From Apple's dev guidelines:iPhone OS 4's new multitasking offers users a new way to quickly move between apps, and provides developers seven new multitasking services to easily add multitasking features to their apps. These services include background audio, so apps like Pandora can play music in the background, and VoIP, so VoIP apps can receive a VoIP call even when the iPhone is asleep or the user is running other apps.
iPhone OS 4 provides multitasking to third party apps while preserving battery life and foreground app performance, which has until now proved elusive on mobile devices.An application can request a finite amount of time to complete some important task. An application can use local notifications to generate user alerts at designated times, whether or not the application is running.Folders help users better organize and quickly access their apps.An application can declare itself as supporting specific services that require regular background execution time. Simply drag one app icon onto another, and a new folder is automatically created. The folder is automatically given a name based on the App Store category of that app, such as "Games," which the user can easily rename. Using folders, users can now organize and access over 2,000 apps on their iPhone.
