iPhone headed to Wal-Mart

On 12/10/08 7:39 PM, in article [email protected],
"Larry" <[email protected]> wrote:

> Jeffrey Kaplan <[email protected]> wrote in
> news[email protected]:
>
>> It's only +between+ apps that
>> is unavailable to developers.
>>
>
> How stupid....
>
How Larry...

---

› See More: iPhone headed to Wal-Mart

Larry wrote:
> Jeffrey Kaplan <[email protected]> wrote in
> news[email protected]:
>
>> It's only +between+ apps that
>> is unavailable to developers.
>>
>
> How stupid....
>

Larry, one day Apple will fix this.

You need to start working on the next attack ....

;-)

--
Adrian C

Adrian C <[email protected]> wrote in news:6qdamtFbvpgbU1
@mid.individual.net:

> Larry wrote:
>> Jeffrey Kaplan <[email protected]> wrote in
>> news[email protected]:
>>
>>> It's only +between+ apps that
>>> is unavailable to developers.
>>>
>>
>> How stupid....
>>
>
> Larry, one day Apple will fix this.
>
> You need to start working on the next attack ....
>
> ;-)
>

I don't believe they will until it supports MULTITASKING.

"Kevin Weaver" <[email protected]> wrote in news:LWg0l.9286
$x%[email protected]:

>> Larry, one day Apple will fix this.
>>
>> You need to start working on the next attack ....
>>
>> ;-)
>>
>> --
>> Adrian C
>
> A year and a half later and still nothing. One day Apple will fix that
?
> When ?
> Then there is the MMS and the Flash and .....
>
>

When hell freezes over?....(c;]

I think some of this is because it is incapable of multitasking external
apps. It simply doesn't have enough onboard memory to multitask in an
Apple environment.

Does anyone know how big the app store apps are? Is there a list of
them, somewhere on the net, we can look over?

There may be hope, though. I understand a movement afoot is to replace
the apple bloatware with Linux, which comes with most of these
deficiencies and whos apps are tiny in comparison. Time will tell....

At 12 Dec 2008 00:35:36 +0000 Larry wrote:


> > A year and a half later and still nothing. One day Apple will fix that
> ?
> > When ?
> > Then there is the MMS and the Flash and .....
> >
> >
>
> When hell freezes over?....(c;]
>
> I think some of this is because it is incapable of multitasking external
> apps. It simply doesn't have enough onboard memory to multitask in an
> Apple environment.


Yes it does- the email client and iPod player both run in the background.

The iPhone is very capable and beautiful chunck of hardware- don't blame
Apple's stupid iNanny-OS design decisions on the device itself. It has
plenty of memory to multitask. It just needs permission from the Man in
Black to do so!

> Does anyone know how big the app store apps are? Is there a list of
> them, somewhere on the net, we can look over?


How big is a PC app?

The apps my wife has downloaded run from a few hundred KB to over 10MB.

> There may be hope, though. I understand a movement afoot is to replace
> the apple bloatware with Linux, which comes with most of these
> deficiencies and whos apps are tiny in comparison. Time will tell....

They've done it to WinMo devices in the past. No one ever manages to get
all the hardware working, unfortunately. As good as those Linux hackers are,
they can't always reverse engineer the hardware to create Linux drivers
from scratch.

Todd Allcock <[email protected]> wrote in news:aCi0l.6078$R43.4800
@newsfe08.iad:

> Yes it does- the email client and iPod player both run in the background.
>
>

Like Windoze, and Mac for that matter, the email client and ipod player are
INTEGRATED INTO THE OS, their various libraries and drivers an integral
part of the OS.

No, I'm talking about the uncanny ability to play EXTERNAL programs, such
as Run-Bunny-Run simultaneously with Flashlight v2.26 or Ploppy-Titty 1.2

I believe THOSE apps run one-at-a-time, right?

At 12 Dec 2008 01:31:02 +0000 Larry wrote:

> > Yes it does- the email client and iPod player both run in the background.

> >
> >
>
> Like Windoze, and Mac for that matter, the email client and ipod player
are
> INTEGRATED INTO THE OS, their various libraries and drivers an integral
> part of the OS.

That's not the point. It illustrates t at the iPhone is capable of
multitasking when it's allowed to.


> No, I'm talking about the uncanny ability to play EXTERNAL programs, such
> as Run-Bunny-Run simultaneously with Flashlight v2.26 or Ploppy-Titty 1.2
>
> I believe THOSE apps run one-at-a-time, right?

Absolutely right. I was only taking issue with your statement that the
phone didn't have enough memory to multitask. My old WinCE-based Casio
E100 could multitask, and it had 16MB of RAM shared between RAM and program
storage!

The only thing stopping 3rd-party apps from multitasking on the iPhone
wears a turtleneck.

On 2008-12-12, Todd Allcock <[email protected]> wrote:
> The only thing stopping 3rd-party apps from multitasking on the iPhone
> wears a turtleneck.

Indeed, jailbreak apps can run in the background fine apparently.

I strongly suspect that the reason that Apple disallow background
applications is that as soon as you allow that, you need some kind
of task manager, something to view the available memory, etc, and
they, in my view quite rightly, figure that most users do not want
the hassle of dealing with that sort of thing.

On my old Nokia N80, I would quite frequently have irritating problems
due to all the various apps that would end up secretly running, hidden
in the background - apps that should never have had the capability of
running in the background in the first place! What's the point of
having the contacts app, for example, running when it's not in the
foreground?

Nearly all iPhone apps have no business running in the background in
the first place, and nearly all of those that do will be well served
by the "push" service that Apple have promised, when it eventually
arrives. I think this is a very clever idea on their part, it
effectively "outsources" a lot of the work of apps that would
otherwise have to be running in the background on your portable
hand-held device, to big data-centre servers with memory and bandwidth
to spare.

Larry wrote:
> Adrian C <[email protected]> wrote in news:6qdamtFbvpgbU1

>
> I don't believe they will until it supports MULTITASKING.
>

What keep one application open while doing DDE from another. Nah. No
way. They can do cut and paste using an OS buffer though...

Anyway, the pocket calculator never had multitasking and cut and paste.
People were OK with that :-)

--
Adrian C

Adrian C wrote:
> Larry wrote:
>> Adrian C <[email protected]> wrote in news:6qdamtFbvpgbU1
>
>>
>> I don't believe they will until it supports MULTITASKING.
>>
>
> What keep one application open while doing DDE from another. Nah. No
> way. They can do cut and paste using an OS buffer though...
>
> Anyway, the pocket calculator never had multitasking and cut and paste.
> People were OK with that :-)
>


Some people still are.

--
jer
email reply - I am not a 'ten'

Todd Allcock <[email protected]> wrote in newstn0l.3664$%z5.275
@newsfe09.iad:

> The only thing stopping 3rd-party apps from multitasking on the iPhone
> wears a turtleneck.
>
>
>

I'd still like to see how big the external apps PLUS their various shared
libraries that would also have to be loaded in to run them really are....

"Larry" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> Todd Allcock <[email protected]> wrote in newstn0l.3664$%z5.275
> @newsfe09.iad:
>
>> The only thing stopping 3rd-party apps from multitasking on the iPhone
>> wears a turtleneck.
>>
>>
>>
>
> I'd still like to see how big the external apps PLUS their various shared
> libraries that would also have to be loaded in to run them really are....

I assume most, if not all, shared libraries are built into the device's
firmware, since the app store limitations probably don't allow for getting
too creative outside the device's APIs. As I've said, the apps, like apps
for any platform, vary in size significantly, based on their complexity.
Some are over 10MB. IIRC prior posts correctly, however, there's a limit of
99 installed apps due to GUI restrictions, which you'd run into long before
filling the phone's storage memory.

"Todd Allcock" <[email protected]> wrote in news:WvA0l.7944
[email protected]:

> which you'd run into long before
> filling the phone's storage memory.
>

There seems to be some confusion about where the programs and data to
run them is stored. I can't see the iPhone, but I can map the Linux
tablet and its various pieces of memory.....

Memory cards are too slow to go calling in and using various libraries
and shared pieces of code without slowing the box to a crawl. So,
there's fast storage built onto the motherboard for programs and shared
libraries. Left alone in default, most of the 3rd party apps will also
use this memory to speed access to read/write storage they need, such as
map tile databases for Maemo Mapper. This app uses lots of memory if
you let it and will literally fill the internal operating memory (not
ram the fast internal flash) with maps, crashing the computer as it
consumes it all. One needs to move Maemo Mapper's data files off to
slower memory on the internal SDHC card (16GB in both of mine). The map
loading crawls along, but doesn't cram the computer's operational flash.
Most of the time internal memory is enough. Some other apps are too
fast to use the cards storage.

It would be like trying to run programs on a nice PC from the USB hard
drive, instead of on the fast internal drives with bus access to
read/write. The boys in the garage have us loading Debian Linux off the
internal card. It's really slow....amazingly slow.

As the iPhone is also an ARM processor computer, I can only assume its
memory map has RAM, fast flash for apps and slower large flash for mass
storage.

In article <[email protected]>, Todd Allcock
<[email protected]> wrote:

> I assume most, if not all, shared libraries are built into the device's
> firmware, since the app store limitations probably don't allow for getting
> too creative outside the device's APIs.

yep, the apps are cocoa based and cocoa is part of os x.

> As I've said, the apps, like apps
> for any platform, vary in size significantly, based on their complexity.
> Some are over 10MB.

the vast majority of them are less than 10 meg with a significant
number of them less than 1 meg. apps with a lot of data, such as word
dictionaries, are larger.

> IIRC prior posts correctly, however, there's a limit of
> 99 installed apps due to GUI restrictions, which you'd run into long before
> filling the phone's storage memory.

it's currently 9 pages of 16 icons + the 4 on the dock at the bottom,
for a total of 148 apps. with a jailbroken iphone, you can have
categories (aka folders) as well as put a 5th icon on the dock.

At 13 Dec 2008 02:55:42 +0000 Larry wrote:

> > which you'd run into long before
> > filling the phone's storage memory.
> >
>
> There seems to be some confusion about where the programs and data to
> run them is stored. I can't see the iPhone, but I can map the Linux
> tablet and its various pieces of memory.....
> Memory cards are too slow to go calling in and using various libraries
> and shared pieces of code without slowing the box to a crawl.


And yet, PDA and phone apps are installed on memory cards every day...


> So,
> there's fast storage built onto the motherboard for programs and shared
> libraries. Left alone in default, most of the 3rd party apps will also
> use this memory to speed access to read/write storage they need, such as
> map tile databases for Maemo Mapper.

Maybe on your Linux table, but that's certainly not the way Windows Mobile
devices work.


> This app uses lots of memory if
> you let it and will literally fill the internal operating memory (not
> ram the fast internal flash) with maps, crashing the computer as it
> consumes it all. One needs to move Maemo Mapper's data files off to
> slower memory on the internal SDHC card (16GB in both of mine). The map
> loading crawls along, but doesn't cram the computer's operational flash.
> Most of the time internal memory is enough. Some other apps are too
> fast to use the cards storage.


Most PDAs and smartphones use a far more PC-like memory structure. RAM for
program execution, and flash (internal or external) as storage. Apps don't
shuffle data from external storage to internal storage any more than MP3s
on your D drive get copied to the C drive first in order to play.

The nav programs on my WinMo phone copy chunks of maps from microSD card
straight to RAM- it never moves data from external storage to internal.


> It would be like trying to run programs on a nice PC from the USB hard
> drive, instead of on the fast internal drives with bus access to
> read/write.


And yet that's what most devices do. A good number of WinMo programs warn
you to install them on internal storage rather than external from better
performance. Ironically, internal storage isn't much faster. I actually
miss WinMo's "good old days" when storage memory used battery-backed RAM
instead of flash. The downside, of course, was that a (completely) dead
battery caused all user installed programs and data to be wiped out, but
the plus side was programs loaded VERY quickly, even on slow "low
horsepower" devices. Another advantage was allocation between storage and
execution space was dynamic. If the device needed extra RAM for execution,
it could "borrow" from unused storage.


> The boys in the garage have us loading Debian Linux off the
> internal card. It's really slow....amazingly slow.


Sure, because the OS is huge compared to a typical mobile OS.


> As the iPhone is also an ARM processor computer, I can only assume its
> memory map has RAM, fast flash for apps and slower large flash for mass
> storage.


Given the relatively high price of the iPhone's flash memory in the "tear
downs" posted on the net, I suspect the 4, 8, or 16GB are fully addressable
by the processor directly- what you're calling "fast flash."

On my AT&T Tilt, there's 128MB RAM, and 256MB internal flash, shared by the
system firmware and user storage area. Of the 256MB, about 130MB is
"locked away" for the device's "ROM" firmware, inaccessable to me. I get
the remaining 125MB for my various nefarious purposes. (In addition, I
have a few 2-4GB cards I swap in/out of the microSD slot as needed.)