views:

248

answers:

1

I have edited this OS 3.2 question based on advice that it could infringe Apple's NDA which is something I have no desire to do. For what its worth I didn't reveal anything likely to upset their lawyers. And in my opinion the SDK is their IP, and therefore it's their decision regarding the terms we agree to when optionally downloading it.

Without breaking NDA I can summarize that it asked for opinion on whether OS features of iPad were likely to become part of the iPhone OS. But consider the question withdrawn...

+4  A: 

It is very likely that by the time the iPad comes out, there will be a new version of the iPhone OS. Whether that's 3.2 or whether it gets bumped all the way up to 4.0 is likely going to be on how much new stuff there is; though my bet is that Apple has worked its way through a lot of engineering resources for the iPad and as such, there won't be that much new-and-noteworthy in the next iPhone/iPad release. We may have to wait longer for other long-desired features (like background tasks).

AlBlue
The irony to me is that the longer apple waits regarding the discussion of multitasking, the harder it will be for them to deliver. They drive the thousands of app store developers hard on memory management, but seem easy going regarding their consumption of CPU cycles. They should be demanding thoughtful prioritization of execution threads about now if they wanted to allow some kind of co-existance in the future?
Nigel
@Nigel - I don't think it's that big a leap. Most people today doing background threads use NSOperationQueues, which are easy to control the priority of - so if they do allow multitasking in the future, then we'll have some guidelines for how to set that properly but the underlying system will probably have some degree of throttling over your app anyway. That's all assuming the iPhone will even allow multitasking, which I'm not sure it will for some time to come as I think they are taking this design philosophy as far as they can take it.
Kendall Helmstetter Gelner