Linked by Hadrien Grasland on Fri 15th Apr 2011 10:24 UTC
Ever since iPhoneOS (now iOS) has been released, there's an old fight going on about how multitasking should work on personal computers, and more specially what should happen to applications which are put in the background. Some advocate that they should be dipped in virtual liquid nitrogen and stop doing anything, like on iOS, which others advocate that they should continue to run in the background, like on desktop OSs. What about putting a little more flexibility in there?
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Which cannot handle download while playing game (while being a lot more powerful in theory).
But as we are nitpicking I consider iOS as a multitasking OS, but not a multi application one, as the limitation come primary from the user space and GUI.
I don'T know the details of Apple implementation, but choices are given and users seems to prefer the Apple approach (even the playbook with QNX have hardly convince anybody with its multi tasking abilities). The Apple implementation seems like a sensible one, as the user don't really seem to care.
And I don't think that normal desktop user cares at all about it, they only want their application to respond quickly if awoken and give notification in their state change. Background tasks are more like "magic elves" for the user as they give little control
( they are not directly available to the user ).
And of course as computer litteral people we care about multi tasking, because we can probably bear more than 1 "window" one our screen for our attention, and that we want to perform task to maximize the computing time of the device.