I saw this over at gizmodo yesterday and thought y’all might be interested in taking a look. The next major release of the iphone OS may be including the ability to run processes in the background. This opens up a world of possibilities for things like instant messenger programs.
Also in the article is a link to some another article that has hints and speculation that a new version of the iphone may be out as early as June.
Everyone is assuming that Apple will allow real background tasks since (a) they skipped the ship date for their lame background-task-replacement, notifications; and (b) they face real competition from the Palm Pre, which has seamless multitasking apps.
That would be nice, but what I really like are the rumors of a better GPU in the new hardware.
Not sure I get what people are expecting (not you Rob) with the “background tasks”… like it’s just going to be a simple matter of a software update.
Background tasks kill your battery. Period.
Following the show on Engadget, looks like we’re instead getting Push, which is cool.
Background tasks don’t kill battery. Period.
Its just not that simple. What kills battery is continuously executing tasks, not sleeping ones, which is what most background tasks should be doing nearly all of the time.
Yes, you do need a notification API of some kind - something richer than having threads wait on sockets and other forms of low-level interprocess communications. Without a higher level notification API, a huge chunk of unsophisticated iPhone developers will put polling loops in their code, which will chew up battery life.
From what I can see, however, under the proposed system, all notifications have to go through Apple’s centralised servers. A centralised point of failure. What happens at 5pm on a Friday afternoon when a 17 million people enter into a flurry of messaging each other? Apple’s servers fall over. There’s no good reason why this needs to be centralised.
@dmorton
We’re actually both referring to the same thing; thanks for filling in the details. 
I’m glad that apple has decided to not allow background tasks and instead integrate the global APN
Much lighter on requirements and CPU costs, dead simple to use and seriously powerfull
And apple has no centralized server, especially not for anything related to the iPhone since the initial problems.
Its a cloud, required for MobileMe, their online office service cloud and further systems anyway. So if that thing fails you won’t have to worry about notifications anymore as the whole appstore likely is just as dead