My Own iPhone OS 4.0 Predictions
Since we have a couple of days before the big iPhone OS 4.0 announcement, I’ve decided to follow in the grand tradition of making a fool out of myself on the Internet. Yes, that’s right, I’m going to make a few “predictions” about iPhone OS 4.0 here. For those of you playing at home, come back in a few days to either laugh at me or wonder just how I had this wonderful insight. (I’m expecting laughs myself…)
Most people on the web seem to think that multitasking will be a feature of 4.0. I think it’s due at this point, but I suspect it won’t be like what we’ve seen on other platforms. I’m thinking that they will limit it’s availability to certain kinds of apps, audio playback being the biggest category. I also think that they will require developers to split their apps into two parts — a front end GUI app that will run the same way 3rd party apps do now and a back end app that can run in the background. This will serve a few purposes. One is that the memory impact of the back end app should be much lower since it will not have all of the GUI components to worry about. The other is that Apple can apply additional scrutiny to the back end to make sure that it’s doing what it’s supposed to. I wouldn’t be shocked to find out that they end up using launchd to control the running of the backends in some way.
With the introduction of the iPad, some of the limitations of the iPhone OS really start to show. I expect to see some printing support of some sort — perhaps a way to print using a Mac or a PC over wireless for example. I don’t have any special insight here, but now that we have a very viable office suite on the iPad, it makes sense to be able to print from it as well.
The iPad interface is very much orientation agnostic now — I fully expect to see this make it’s way over to the iPhone and iPods as well.
Other things I would like to see — Text-To-Speech APIs. Beginning with the 3GS, Apple made the iPhone devices support text to speech as an accessibility feature. Now would be a great time for Apple to expose that functionality to all iPhone apps in 4.0.
Better sharing of data between apps would be very welcome. Right now, each app has their own sandbox that they can store data into. Apps can only share data via the clipboard or via app-specific URL schemes. But there is nothing right now that would allow me, for example, to take a file I have in my Dropbox and send it to Pages to edit it.
Those are just a few of the things I’m looking forward to in iPhone OS 4.0 — come back in a few days to see if I was right or to mock me.
