As with any product made by Apple, the iPhone’s interface and overall user experience could be improved in a few areas. Ars Technica has compiled a list of twelve features that they would like to see in iPhone OS 4.0. The final item on that list is multitasking and running multiple applications on the iPhone.
The reasons that Apple has given for not already including this feature on the first three iterations of the iPhone OS are perfectly valid. The battery life of the phone would suffer. There is limited memory. There are limited processor cycles. However, the iPhone seems to be directed towards technologically savvy consumers. One might reason that the majority of iPhone owners would be willing to suffer deteriorated battery life in order to get multitasking.
The usability issue with not having multitasking capabilities is that the user would have to leave an application in order to run another application. An example would be trying to send an email to schedule an appointment. One would have to leave Mail.app, open Calendar.app, get the desired information, and return to Mail.app to finish the email. This process may even have to be repeated several times in the course of writing that email.
Mac OS X has an excellent application switcher in the form of Cmd-Tab. There is no reason that some adaptation of this could not be ported to the iPhone. A shake gesture could be set up to call up the switcher. The double-press of the Home button could also be configured for this.
As for background applications, like an instant messenger application, those could be set up and enabled for background processes just like Apple has set up push notifications in iPhone OS 3.0. There is no need for an ugly Windows-style process manager. Just show a simple list of applications that have background capability and whether or not it is enabled. It could be as simple as that.
Apple has the ability to allow people who want multitasking and background processes to do it effectively. Hopefully, this feature will make an appearance in iPhone OS 4.0 sometime this year.
I love school. I cannot imagine not being in school, a reality that I will likely be faced with. To myself and some other people, there is no better place to be than in an educational institution. Why not stay there forever?
Even if you are not a teacher, you still get to shape the educational system in some way. If you are an academic advisor, you get to help students plan their academic, and possibly professional, careers. If you are a software developer or systems administrator within a university, you might be creating or supporting information systems that allow for efficient comunications between students and their instructors.
There are dozens of different positions within a major university that might involve never setting foot inside a classroom. However, being there would allow you to continue your own education for years, even decades with relative ease. Go to work, go to class, go home. You could do that for years. I know I would love to have that opportunity.
I do not see myself leaving the education system happily and would love to stay here and work. It is really the best place to be to shape the future of our society and to help ensure its continuity, before the young minds here become too old and stubborn to stray from their stupidity.
Last week, Google broke the news that they had been hacked and that the attack originated from China. Since Google has been careful to not keep any of its servers or data in China, opting to store everything on servers in the United States, it is likely that the Chinese government itself is responsible for the attack. Google responded to this by announcing publicly that they would no longer be filtering content on Google.cn searches in compliance with Chinese laws. This essentially has ended Google’s corporate presence in China for the foreseeable future.
Maybe Google did the right thing here. It is not the only corporation that has submitted to the Chinese authorities in order to have a presence and marketshare there. As part of the Golden Shield Project, anything that is deemed inappropriate or subversive on the internet by the Chinese government is blocked. Since Facebook and Twitter are exceptionally hard to filter, those sites are blocked out entirely.
By leaving its 30% marketshare of the Chinese search market, Google essentially took a financial hit so that it could redeem its moral standing to a degree.
If internet and technology companies want to send a message to the entire world that they will stand up for free speech on the internet, then they should simply leave any country that uses internet censorship to repress its own people.
While China is fairly tech-savvy and its own native search engine, Baidu, would likely pick up the slack, the tech companies that leave would at least be able to keep themselve true to the spirit of the internet: an open, free forum for public discussion and communication.
Patrick Proctor was here 