Be Excellent To Each Other

My money is on restricted multitasking, richer notifications, and a unified email inbox.

Note this is a developer preview event; the OS won't be publically available until the summer, if it follows the patterns of previous years.

If all those things are in there, I'd be quite pleased.

And how we laughed at the Windows 7 parties....

Whens the new iPhone out? I've just refused an upgrade on the basis that the 3Gv2 isn't a big enough leap for me.

June/July from past releases, if there is one.



Those'd all be lovely, especially the first and last three.

Unified email inbox has been allegedly confirmed by Jobs himself. I think some form of multitasking is a shoo-in, but exactly what it looks like is a different question.

We don't know for sure. But the iPhone v1 came out in 29th June 2007, the 3G was 11th July 2008, and the 3GS was 19th June 2009. Take a wild guess. I think you're wise not to upgrade now; I'm still rocking my 3G for the same reason.

Some people think may, some people think june, some people think july.

Personally, I think either may, june or july.

I would also kill for a rotation lock.

If we get that (and the iPad does have it), it'll be a physical switch rather than a software mod, so it'll be an iPhone v4 thing, rather than an OS4 thing. I have no idea how you'd implement it on existing hardware, except possibly some sort of multi-button tapdance, and those are already well out of hand on the iPhone right now. The "kill this process" command is fucking ridiculous.

Why physical? Surely it's a pretty damned simple process to put in a software cutout to ignore the tilt sensor?

How about - hold your finger on the centre of the screen while rotating the device to the new orientation - then it stays locked in the same direction until you reverse the gesture.

Like turning a key, sort of. Makes sense dunnit?

How about stop waddling.

Sure. Now tell me the UI.

"Be touching the screen while rotating to lock"

(c) kalmar 2010

Great. Now that's patented. Next suggestion.

You know the one feature I'd like?

While you hold your finger on the screen in Safari, that position is the centre of the page. Loading still occurs in the background, but appends and prepends your finger's location with content, instead of waiting until you let go, then jumping everything everywhere so you lose your place.

Uh - an on/off toggle in the settings app?

With a Hori/Vert radio button. (c) Zardoz 2010

i would most appreciate an update subscriptions button in the ipod app..

my contract runs out in early '11 so the iphone g4 has some margin in reaching us..

are we gambling dates? i say june 25th...

When I press the Safari button I want Chris Biggins to pop up and say "On Safari!" and then you have to reply "So Goody" before the app will open.

That or an FM/DAB radio integrated in the unit. Won't happen though.

I really really want to be able to sync to my main itunes on my PC, without needing a fucking cable.

I am still surprised Apple is not doing this (unless they're doing it with one of the iPods) - my Zune could do it four years ago.

So I assume this OS4 will work with my 3GS then?

Also, I think there is an app with a software screen rotation lock. If you rotate the device a little transparent window pops up with a rotation symbol and a pad lock in the centre. Tap it and it stops further rotation. Can't remember what though...

While we are on the subject of blinkered design decisions made by an-arrogant-company-that-thinks-they-know-better-than-the-actual-users-of-their-products-and-could-be-fixed-with-a-simple-change-but-stubbornly-refuse-to-make-that-change-through-some-sort-of-what-I-can-only-assume-is-wounded-pride-yet-otherwise-make-excellent-products.
I'd like to throw in the iTunes "apple has decided to stop downloading this podcast, as it seems you have forgotten about it and obviously cant be trusted with technology, here look at some pretty kittens instead" message.

Just fuck off Apple and let me make my own choices.

Erm, thats just a setting that you change.

Show me that setting please, for it doesn't exist

it is? i hate that as well, usually i just want alot of podcast s on it, for just that moment i want to listen to one of them, and yet then it turns out itunes has stopped downloading it two weeks ago, making the latest episode irrelevant...

Prediction: we'll have some sort of cloud syncing that puts iTunes server side for Apple's mobile devices. Maybe not this year.

Seems likely.

A few apps do that, like Kindle. Craster wants something OS-wide though.

It really doesn't. And I really wish it did.

Yus. Something extremely simple that would be two minutes work. Please.

Huh, weird.

Ah, I'm thinking of how long you want it to keep podcasts.

Thats terrible that it does that.

Do hope my 3GS can run OS4. I do like new things...

Automatic unsubscribe works on the basis of :

If you haven't listened to the last 5 podcasts, and haven't listen to a podcast in that subscription for the past 5 days, then you OBVIOUSLY don't want to be subscribed to it, so it automatically unsubscribes you.

It helpfully puts a gloating icon beside it to tell you it has fucked it up for you, which is nice.

OS3 supported the 2G, I'd be rather surprised if they expired support for that, the 3G, and the 3GS in one fell swoop. No, more than rather surprised - apoplectic with rage.

Crikey, that's even easier than redefinable controls on console games.

They're happy to do it with their PC OS, though. And quite correct to do so (when it needs doing), IMHO.

Haha, wut? Not even Apple is that daft.

I wouldn't be totally shocked if a multitasking addition to the OS was disabled on the 2G and 3G models, as they have half the RAM of the 3GS and iPad. Not sure how much RAM the various iPod Touches have though.

Given that Apple have been through two complete architecture changes (68k->PPC->x86) and supported backwards compatability each time, I'd say they've done quite a lot. You do hear complaints about older models being dropped from newer OSs but the models in question are often 5+ years old. If Apple kit didn't have such (bizarrely) impressive second hand values no-one would be using such old machines anyway. Snow Leopard was released in August 06 and the model cut-off was Feb 06, which is shorter than average for Apple but also marked the transition to Intel processors.

Edit -- and Leopard was Oct 07 and supported models from mid-'02.

what do you mean by that? the powerpc-intel was quite smoothly, and leopard stull run on powerpc..

only since a year my imac g4 feels behind the times..

I'd have no issue with them dropping updates for the 2G at this stage, but beyond that is madness.

What Gaywood said, really. But I wasn't really on about backcompat (although there is that), more that they were happy to make huge design changes when they felt they needed to, whereas MS seem afeared of changing anything too much in case the users get sad.
For example, you can run Windows 95 on a PC designed for Win7, and vice-versa (assuming it has 64meg of RAM). And that's just silly.

I don't think it'll be "no updates for you". I think it'd be "you can have the update but bits X and Y aren't going to work", like when you run Maps on a no-GPS 2G iPhone. Or use those barcode scanning apps on a 3G that struggle with the fixed-focus camera.

However it's possible the 128Mb of RAM in the 3G will not allow multitasking. Is that madness?

The vast, vast array of Windows apps, going back to Win16 binaries, that can be run on any Windows machine is both Microsoft's biggest selling point and it's biggest handicap.

You can't buy it or get support for it though.

You could get support for Win7 on an supa-old PC. The actual minimum running specs of a Win7 PC are teeny.

Right - and why's that a problem? If they wanted to for some reason "expire", they'd just up the minimum required specs, surely? Also, Apple sell their own hardware. It's far more in their interest to drop support for older kit than it would ever be for Microsoft.

1Ghz CPU, 1 Gb RAM, DX9 graphics? That's not that weenie. How old a PC do we think that covers? The DX9 requirement nobbles lots of older kit.

I've been using Redlaser quite a bit on my 2G. How it works is.. well, it's clever image processing filters, but it seems like voodoo!

Think I read somewhere that they were going to use the MUTE button to allow rotation locking... instead of ... well... mute. Guess it would be configurable. I read it with regards to the iPad.

I think that's speculation based on the fact that the iPad has a rotation lock instead of the mute switch. As useful as a rotation lock might be, I use mute a lot more often.

We wish!

Windows 7 will run in 64MB of RAM? Pity whoever tested that out.