Spot any errors? let me know, but Unleash your pedant politely please.

Thursday 8 April 2010

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Task Manager

I was in the pub last night. Sadly this doesn't happen enough these days, but there was a free meal in the offing, it wasn't £5.99 "chicken ding!", and it got me out of Fat Fighters this week. The conversation inevitably landed, at one point, on the iPad, and then meandered to the iPhone, then iPhone OS 4.0, and multitasking.

I pointed out that we don't know anything yet. All we know is that we have a date where 4.0 will be announced. That's announced, not released. New features, perhaps APIs and perhaps a new version of Xcode, but the OS itself will be released later.

What my colleagues actually want from multi-tasking, it seems, is not very much. Generally one additional thing, like Spotify/Pandora, or GPS tracking while running/cycling.

There was, thankfully, an acknowledgement that other devices that had no restraints on multi tasking were, frankly, shit, would grind to a halt, and require task managers to get things moving again.

This morning, I read no-multitasking-in-iphone-4-0, which sums things up quite nicely. This response "There may be some new audio API to allow Spotify in b/g, etc." makes a lot of sense. That would probably address 90% of complaints.

I was thinking that permitting a single background app would be OK, not just music. Suitable apps would have a low use background mode that would not exceed, say 5% of system resources, or however much the Music app currently uses when playing music in the background. Apps would qualify for background apps status during the approval process.

As useful as this might be, there needs to be a simply UI for managing this. The good news is that we already have it: start a task (like play some music), and quit the app. The app switches to background mode, and the foreground app quits, returning the user to the home screen. While the background app is running, a double-click opens a control to stop/pause/switch etc.

The bad news is that this isn't quite enough. I could have my GPS-tracking and Spotify running at the same time, but what happens when I quit the second qualified-to-run-as-a-background-app app ? How do I indicate to the user what just happened ? The options seem to be:

  • 1st background app continues to run, 2nd app just quits, user receives no indication.

  • 1st background app quits, 2st app switches to background mode,user receives no indication.

  • User gets a popup asking which one to run in the background


Finger-in-the-air, that probably covers 99% of case. Bump the limit to 2 running background apps, and this whole UI is broken. The extra 1% simply isn't worth the UI pain. We don't need no stinkin' task manager