At Apple’s iPhone SDK roadmap event, Steve Jobs specifically pointed out that 3rd party developers are getting access to the same SDK that Apple developers use. Well now people have their hands on the SDK, a crucial piece of information has been highlighted clearly showing this is not the case.
3rd party applications running on the iPhone will be restricted to one at a time. This is clearly not the case for Apple built apps. You can have music running while browsing the web for example.
I understand this is probably required so 2 or more apps don’t attempt to use 60% of the memory, resulting in one crashed iPhone. However memory management aside, Steve Jobs should have let people know about this pretty severe limitation, rather than promoting the SDK was the same one Apple uses.
I wonder what the notification to the end user will be ? Will the user be prompted to inform them opening a 2nd application will close the 1st, will it simply shut the other down, will it be up to the user to exit the first then go to the second ?
Update – turns out the current app will just shut.
We live in a multitasking world now, I currently have 8 applications running on my desktop, I may need less on a handheld, but certainly 3-4 would be very handy.
So Mail (developed by Apple) can download messages in the background, but if a 3rd party develops an RSS reader, it can’t do the same. Not cool. As with everything the devil is in the detail.
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