Remember the limitation to launch various apps and to do multi-tasking limitations on iPhone?To refresh your memory, let’s read again the Apple’s documentation that says: “Only one iPhone application can run at a time, and third-party applications never run in the background. This means that when users switch to another application, answer the phone, or check their email, the application they are using quits.”
Looks like Apple understand the needs to address this growing issue immediately, before it’s getting out of their hands due to high demands from iPhone users for clarification. At last WWDC ’08 conference, Apple presented us with the new workaround on background processes with what it calls a robust push architecture available to all third-party apps. This is an Apple-owned server that developers can access and use to push notifications to iPhone users.
The “Push Notification” will maintain a persistent IP connection to the phone and let a 3rd party server ping Apple's notification service in order to push out notifications your device, which can be in the form of badges, sounds or custom textual alerts.
Any messages from developer apps get piped into user's phones in one of three different types of notifications--counters badges (for something like a new e-mail message), audio cues, and pop-up messages that look similar to text alerts.
But here’s the real catch behind the new solution; Apple has repeatedly mentioned the service could preserve battery life and maintain performance. Sure it does sound logical, having a large number of apps constantly polling for updates sucks down battery power faster, so by keeping a single connection over which data is pushed and work on the phone is minimized. You also maximize battery life and maximize bandwidth usage because data can be aggregated on the server side and be sent in large chunks rather than a random distribution of small packets.There’s a deep thought from John Lowensohn (Webware) that we have to keep in mind: "...my guess is that the company realized this would be a great time to get a handle on all the potentially great marketing data that leaves the second an app is downloaded from the new App Store."
We’ll have to wait & see, how this “Push Notification” service will turn out to be? And what is Apple’s real agenda behind it?
You can watch the video presentation of the new “Push Notification” service below, or continue read on the sources from:
[blogged with my Treo 750v]
No comments:
Post a Comment