> I understand > that Android encourages you to intercept the message flow, so I'm > curious how that works in practice.
In practice, Android has a truly unique way of doing this. You don't have an arbitrary number of processes running constantly as per the usual time-slice semantics. Rather, your application is actively divided between activities (view/UI), services and intents (events on a message bus). At any given time, your application can be paused (event requires your attention), stopped (another activity is shown on top) or terminated (not enough memory). Interestingly, you never really explicitly quit an application on Android, you simply exit from the activity. All these activities are still stored in RAM, taking advantage of the fact that hot RAM is no more costly than empty RAM (either way, the DRAM cells needs a power boost many times a second). In fact, it might very well save battery since it becomes extremely fast to move around between applications (activities). Hardware is plenty powerful now, I think the core reason why Apple have not yet added multi-tasking is due to complexity. As all programmers witness first hand, parallel stuff is more complicated than sequential stuff and that goes for usability too - especially if you only have one button available! > I wonder, if there was no App store, you could install what you want. > Would people be throwing their iPhones down in disgust as they grind > to a halt, not because anything Apple has done but because people try > to use them beyond their ability. It's certainly interesting to look at the 3 common practices, iP* OS (one exclusive marked) vs. Android (one dominating/de-facto marked) vs. Maemo (repositories). From left to right, usability as well as democracy tends to go hand in hand. > I believe Apple are trying to > get us closer to the future. Obviously, the geekier of us who are > used to total control over a system will revolt against it. Well they are making content devices more than computers. Knowing Apple's practices I have no doubt that they have taken advantage of their custom SOC A4 to make it even more locked down. So while that might be innovation usable for my parents, it carries with the hefty price that it's not the kind of innovation that encourages tinkering. And tinkering is probably what got most of us all into this trade in the first place (for me, it was moving from Lego to electronics to basic/assembly). /Casper -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
