Apple's iOS4 is out - and it's free

Macheads rejoice - we've finally got multitasking on the iPhone. Photo / Supplied

As promised at the World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco a few weeks ago, iOS4 came out today. The version for iPhones and iPods, anyway - the iPad version is not available yet.

The update adds several interesting features, including a limited amount of multitasking, folders, iBooks and GameCenter.

It's called 'iOS' now and not 'iPhone OS', since it works on iPad too, and having a system called 'iPhone OS' on iPad was just getting confusing. Besides, who knows what other iDevices apple has gestating away in its labs that might benefit from this stripped-and-lean OS X derivative?

To get the update, which is free even for iPod touches now, after a change in accounting practices by Apple last year, you connect your iPhone 3G or 3GS, or iPod touch second- or third-generation model, to the computer with which you sync iTunes data. Select the device in the iTunes sidebar, and click Check for Updates in the Summary tab. Beware it will take quite some time to download and install - the iOS 4 download is 378MB.

Many other minor updates are on board, too - more advanced photo sorting and better HTML5 video support.

But multitasking is off-limits for the iPhone 3G and second-generation iPod touch - neither has the power or memory to handle it well, according to Apple (the new iPhone, out in a month or so, has a lot more RAM and a faster, A4 processor).

The update currently works for the iPhone 3G and 3GS as well as second- and third-generation iPod touches.

The original iPhone and first-generation iPod touch don't have hardware capable of handling iOS4. Patching requires iTunes 9.2 and checking for an update enabled in the device's general setup pane - I ran mine at 7am this morning and it timed out three times before I successfully got it onto my iPhone 3GS. I'm not sure whether that was my home connection struggling for a local reason, or due to Apple's servers bowing under the pressure.

Once the software was safely on my own iPhone, the most obvious change is the look of the icons. Not the app icons themselves, but the fact they now float over your desktop picture, whereas before they were just on black.

I immediately felt compelled to take a better desktop picture - once that wasn't too busy, as that just looked annoying with app icons on top. Doing so, I also noticed you can now set a desktop picture separate to you lock-screen picture.

Even the camera felt different - faster shutter action, faster loading into the gallery.

Multitasking

But the most notable single improvement is multitasking - several kinds of activities can continue to function in the background while you're using other apps. These activities include continuing a VoIP phone call, and updating location for navigation apps, and playing music and finishing a download.

Both of those last two you could already do, by the way, with some apps like B.iCycle, anyway. Also, Apple's memo recorder happily carried on recording whatever else you ran; you had to boot the app again and specifically stop it to save the memo.

Apparently multitasking was resisted by Apple on the grounds of battery and performance drain, but since other smartphones accomplished this easily, Apple was under pressure.

This new, if still limited implementation focuses on common scenarios where a live task is genuinely needed: audio players, location-aware apps, VoIP and anything that needs either to finish an active task or send a local notification.

And note, again, that only the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and third-generation iPod touch owners get multitasking; Apple claims the experience would be poor on any weaker hardware, where RAM and processor speed could play a part.

Developers need to update their apps to take advantage of iOS4 multitasking, and Apple started accepting these revised iOS 4 apps from 10 June. So companies will most likely start promoting specific improved multitasking features as their updates are made available in the App Store.

To see if any of your current apps support it, double-tap your Home button. This brings up a tray, beneath which all apps that are considered active, even if they technically don't support multitasking, appear. Hold an app to make 'em jiggle - now you can close out of the apps. Tapping an app once switches to it.

In use, in other words, you may have an app running. Double-tap the Home button and you see what other apps you can run, as they appear at the bottom of the screen in groups of four you can scroll side-to-side through.

One caveat is the orientation - even in apps that force landscape mode, like many games, the app switcher always appears at the bottom of the device screen.

For every tasks, it's convenient. You no longer have to reload every app whenever you're done in a given environment. Even in older apps that can't exit gracefully, it still usually brings you back to where you were through fast switching, rather than beginning fresh.

Some multitasking apps use the same expanded title bar as active phone calls or tethering when they're in the background, letting you know something important is going on, such as audio recording in Voice Memos or an upload to Dropbox.

But you don't have complete control over background tasks. An iOS app can't start a download all on its own, for example, or receive notifications that weren't either created online or while the app was open.

In this sense, Android and veterans like Symbian still have the edge, says iPodNN.


An Android user can find out about a direct Twitter message as soon as it arrives or RSS feed updates on a set schedule. So anyone expecting to juggle several apps at full strength on iPhone will be dismayed, but iOS4 goes a long way towards addressing the actual situations where background tasks are needed.

Organisation

Organising apps on iPhone involved either treating home screens - each holding 16 apps apart from the four default apps that always appear along the bottom - as de facto folders, and using several side-swipes to get to an app several screens away. On mine I have the first default screen, then handiest apps, then travel apps, photo apps, sound apps and games, for example.

In iOS 4, it's now possible to group several apps together in a folder and to have as many app folders as you like.

Creating a folder just requires holding your finger on one app till the jiggle (the iPhones entry into reordering mode). Now tap twice on one of the apps, but hold the second tap - this allows you to drag the app on top of another, picking a name (one is suggested based on the app type) and saying you're finished. From then on, adding apps just needs subsequent drags on to the same folder, as long as you're in 'jiggle mode' (I'm pretty sure Apple doesn't call it that).

It's possible to rename folders and reorder the apps inside. Opening one requires a single tap that 'pulls' it open to show the contents. Notification badges appear on the folders containing relevant apps.

You can shrink your iPhone's home screen count with a few minutes work. You can also edit these from the app layout pane when the device is docked with the latest version of iTunes, but in either case it no longer has to be a nuisance to have seldom-used apps occupying space.

Email and other changes

A unified inbox is another improvement. You can now pool all your mail accounts into a single inbox view. That saves time clearing messages and just launching back into the app once it's closed, rather than going backwards and forwards to get into another account hierarchy. If you attach photos to mail, you can now shrink them to one of three reduced sizes if the original would take too long or strain your email server - this will be more important with iPhone 4, which has a higher resolution camera thus bigger images.

Events, not just albums, show up in the list. Faces and Places now show up if your photos are tagged accordingly, and 'Add Playlist...' is now an option inside the music player app called 'iPod'.

iBooks ... we don't get that yet; we have to wait till it's added to our iTunes Store.

Once paired, any standard Bluetooth keyboard will now provide at least typing and even some shortcuts: on a Mac-ready keyboard, the usual copy/cut/paste/select shortcuts work too, and any media key that works with a Mac works with your iPad or iPhone, such as skipping or brightness.

Spell-check has been improved too - if more than one suggestion is available, iOS floats the options above the word; tapping the one you want changes it accordingly. And the Messages app has now caught up to Twitter clients with a text counter showing how close you are to the limit, an important warning to avoid splitting messages into two. You have to turn this on in Settings>Messages, then little grey numbers appear just above the Send button.

At last!

- Mark Webster mac-nz.com