iPhone 4.0 Predictions
Here are my predictions and analysis of the rumours before the OS 4.0 event later on today.
Notifications
The notification system badly needs a UI overhaul. This is one area where we can all agree that Android and Pre do it better.
Springboard
This is the trademark look and feel for the iPhone OS line of products, so Apple shouldn’t change it much, but there are some limitations that should be addressed. It doesn’t scale well with lots of apps.
Sync
Most iPhone owners I know don’t connect their iPhones to their computers regularly. They buy music on their iPhones, use their iPhone calendar and don’t care about backups till it’s too late. There’s no reason not to make this just work. Extra points for making it easy for 3rd party apps like 1Password to keep in sync with each other.
Printing
Conspicuously absent from the iPad is any decent way to print. Along with the syncing issue above, this means that owning an iPad also means owning one of those old fashioned ‘Macs’ or ‘PCs’. Main problem is availability of the drivers (will every manufacturer recompile them for ARM or will the OS use some clever emulation?) — delivery is easy: same way Snow Leopard does it. Download as required.
Multitasking
There has always been multitasking, so at it’s simplest, ‘adding’ it is a mere app store policy change. The current policy exists for a reason however: to maintain the quality of the experience. A background app free-for-all would kill performance, wear down your battery and potentially run up your data bill. That’s out of the question. If multitasking is introduced at all, it’s a safe bet that it will be much more limited than what you’re used to.
Apple could choose to place strict limits on the resources available to background apps. (EG: Max: 5MB of RAM & only the owner’s chosen 4 dock apps can run in the background) But what happens when the app exceeds the limits? Does the OS kill it? That’ll piss off the marathon runner who’s been monitoring his speed with a background GPS app. “Piece of shit iPhone!” he’ll say.
I don’t think there’ll be 3rd party multitasking, at least nothing like the way we understand it now. I do have a guess at a related compromise that we might see instead though.
Background Tasks
Severely policed tasks with no UI that run for a few seconds and deal only with data. These could be
- Queued
Most of the time that your phone’s in your pocket, it’s conserving power: the display is off, WIFI is off, it’s not communicating with the internet, etc. It wakes up occasionally to check e-mail. What if you could register to have some code executed when the phone is awake and the internet connection is available anyway? The marginal cost of a few extra kb is low. The bottleneck in most of the apps I use regularly is pulling the tweets, facebook updates, rss feeds, etc. If one argument for background apps is ‘faster start-up’, this feature would help. It also keeps the OS in charge — when the battery’s low it might choose not to execute these tasks. - Scheduled
As above, but on the app’s own schedule. A way to register for some code to be executed (or at least an internally generated ‘push’ notification) at a precise time.
Dashboard for iPad
There’s no place for a full screen Clock, Stocks or Weather app on the iPad. I’m not the first to suggest this, but mark me down as a Yes for Dashboard on iPad.
Well those are my predictions … I’m looking forward to following the event and then quietly deleting this blog post when I’m shown to be embarrassingly wrong!
