With the introduction of the new iOS 4 (and the shiny iPhone 4’s), Carrot certainly hasn’t been lacking in ideas for new apps. Likewise we’ve been getting plenty of requests and ideas coming our way from clients. Everyone wants their apps to be iOS4 ready, but not many know what that actually means. The most hype we’re seeing is dealing with iAds and multitasking, so let’s take a quick look at this new hotness.
Firstly, iAds. There are two sides to this awesome Apple foundation. There’s the app side and the ad side. The ad side is where the meat and potatoes are; these are the companies that are investing their time and money to make interactive HTML5 advertisements. App side is the plate that displays the garnished ads, and Apple made this process deceptively easy – in just a few minutes iAd support can be added to almost any app. With Carrot’s web and mobile experience we’re in a prime position for working with both sides of this delicious meal.
The new feature that people get a little stuck on is multitasking. iOS4 does support this, but to a limited extent. Apps can’t run willy-nilly doing whatever they want, whenever they want – there are strict limitations in place for multitasking. Let’s break it down; there are 4 “types” of multitasking for apps:
Audio: Music apps, like Pandora, can stream audio.
Location: GPS apps, like TomTom, can give directions.
VoIP: Phone apps, like Skype, can continue the call.
Backgrounding: Everything else.
Audio, location, and VoIP can leave an application running as long as the audio is playing, their location is needed, or they are making a call. There is no time limit on how long an app can be running in the background with these settings, but that’s all they should be doing.
The fourth way to keep an app running, “backgrounding”, is limited. We can do a lot of things, but only for a short amount of time. By default it’s around 10 minutes, but the phone can still close the app forcefully if it needs the memory. The only interaction we can have with the user during this time is push notifications. It’s mostly to allow the phone to finish what it’s doing before getting closed permanently.
For the most part, when you see that a basic app has become “Multitask Ready” it usually just means they set it up so it saves data in different states before closing. That way when the app opens again that data is ready to go, taking less time to reach the point you were at before you closed it. Granted, it’s all a little more complicated than that, involving different states an app can be in (active, suspended, in the background, and terminated), but that’s a quick look at the options.
The good news is that Apple lets us schedule push notifications locally from an app. Now we don’t need to register with Apple’s push notification service depending on the type of tasks we want to accomplish. These local notifications are a great way to remind users when apps are closed. Say if we wanted them to put in a specific set of numbers every 108 minutes, we can schedule a notification to happen 108 minutes after they enter the numbers to remind them to do it again. The downside to this method is they need to open the app in the first place.
Get all that? I know, it was a lot. By now you must be bursting with app ideas, so share them with me on Twitter @antrants. Better yet, if you’re in Brooklyn, drop by Carrot Creative and grab a beer with me. I know a great little place with free wifi where we can romance about the new iPhone.
