- Daniel

Background Music for 65Bits is courtesy of spinningmerkaba.

Stories from this episode:

1. Apple’s 2011 Q1 Financial Report [TheVerge, CNN]
2. Nokia sells 1.5Billionth Series 40 device
3. Nokia sells 1 million Nokia Lumias / Microsoft paid Nokia to use Windows Phone
4. Next Generation Xbox details leaked in rumor
5. Olympus releases first Micro Four Thirds motorized zoom lens
6. Steam Mobile beta out on iOS and Android
7. Angry Birds Facebook game out soon
8. Google merging its Privacy Policy and Terms of Service
9. Twitter to begin censoring tweets and users in some countries

And from all of us here at Tech65, Happy Chinese New Year!!

- Daniel

Background Music for 65Bits is courtesy of spinningmerkaba.

Stories in this episode

1. Apple’s Education Announcement reveals iBooks 2, iBooks Author, iTunes U
2. Facebook launches Open Graph Initiative with 60 partners
3. Microsoft introduces Achievements to Visual Studios
4. Star Trek Online goes Free to Play
5. Kodak files for bankruptcy
6. Courts opens new branches in the West
7. Singtel gives away free stuff on Lunar New Year holiday

- Daniel

Background Music for 65Bits is courtesy of spinningmerkaba.

Stories in this episode:

1. OLPC’s XO 3.0 tablet revealed
2. Razer’s Project Fiona gaming tablet revealed
3. Panasonic’s MySpace app for their Vierra Connect HD TVs
4. Google updates Google Maps for Android
5. Microsoft signs new patent licensing agreement with LG, covers 70% of Android devices in the US
6. Microsoft hints at October 2012 release date for Windows 8
7. Apple to hold education event next Thursday
8. Challenger stops 24-hour service at their super store in Funan

There are actually quite a number of people I’ve met that didn’t know you can lock your iPhone’s screen orientation! If you’re one of those people, this episode of iOShow is for you.

Background Music for 65Bits is courtesy of spinningmerkaba.

In this Episode we talk about..

1. Facebook Timeline now available worldwide
2. Facebook aims to reduce suicide
3. Sony Ericsson and Box give free 50GB cloud storage
4. YouTube introduces YouTube Schools
5. Microsoft launches a series of iOS apps
6. iTunes store opens in Brazil and other Latin American countries
7. Singapore to develop hybrid disk drives for mobile devices

-Daniel

Background Music for 65Bits is courtesy of spinningmerkaba.

In this Episode we talk about..

1. Google Singapore’s top searches
2. Nintendo’s Miyamoto stepping down but staying in company
3. Logic Pro 9 now on App Store
4. GTA 3 to be released on December 15 on iOS and Android
5. Blackberry DecCon Asia 2011

At a recent event at NUS University Town, Ignite 2011, we caught up with Sidwyn Koh from The Pragmatic Lab. The Pragmatic Lab is a school to teach iOS development.

Sidwyn is an experienced trainer who teaches iOS development to numerous individuals, professionals and companies. He received excellent feedback for all his previous classes, and received a letter of recommendation from his previous employer.

Sidwyn’s iOS applications have been featured on the App Store (Staff Favorites / New and Noteworthy) and lauded with praise. His huge portfolio boasts Definition, Seesmic, FreshLook and iTooch, with many more to come.

Last night is iPhone 4S official launch in Singapore. We take a look at how Singapore launches the iPhone 4S on all of our 3 service providers, and compare their different approaches.

This week we will take a look at Splashtop, a remote viewing and control for your desktop or Mac on your iPhone and iPad.

iPhone 4S Unboxing video by Jerrick Lim from Ask Jerrick. Set in a nondescript, atypical iPhone 4 casing, the phone, does not have the indication that it is different from the usual iPhone 4.

The outer casing, if you look closely, differs from iPhone 4S, in the little designs, but otherwise, the usual iPhone 4 covers will still fit into this.

We shall wait for Jerrick to go through with us the differentiating factors separating the 4S and the 4.

iOS 5 is here! Here’s a walk-through of how to use some of the new features on iOS 5!

We got a chance to lay our hands on the new iPad 2 which will be coming out in April for Singapore. Special thanks to Wilfred.

Special thanks to Jimmy Yap, editor at iMerlion.com, for his time and insight in this episode!

Apple recently announced iPhone OS 4.0 enabling “multitasking” of a sorts. I want to dig slightly deeper into understanding what they actually mean by this “multitasking”, without talking too much about the nitty gritty details.

There are 7 kinds of “services” they expose for multitasking:

• Background Audio
• Voice over IP
• Background Location
• Push Notifications
• Local Notifications
• Task Completion
• Fast App Switching

Among all 7 “services” exposed, 6 of them are somewhat already available in the system itself, one way or another, with hidden APIs not exposed for public developer usage. Let’s take a look at each of them, and how they might “save battery” without “slowing down the system”.

Background Audio

The background audio is simply what the iTunes application already does, which is to play audio in the background without having the iTunes application open. This simply means they just expose what iPhone can already do to developers. This does not make any changes to slowing down the system in any way, since people have been using the iTunes application to play background music since the first iteration of the iPhone and iPod Touch. However, understand that the application does not remain open at all, only a small portion of the “application” remains streaming the music.

Voice over IP

Voice services has been around ever since the beginning of the iPhone (duh?!?) with the Phone application, running constantly in the background to “receive” calls. This, in fact, is also not a full fledged application at all, but a small part of code that “reacts” to an action by the OS (namely the voice service) to load up the application and “receive” the action to do something about it.

Background Location

Similarly with the voice service, it is simply a “reaction” or a “response” to an action that the OS has prompted, in this case, your GPS or Wifi location based services. This is probably one of the things that will drain your battery pretty quickly, since these services do take a lot of resources. However, since the control lies with the OS of how and when to serve up this reaction and NOT the application that decides to take over your entire GPS and Wifi location based services into their hands and drain your battery dry, the OS will probably have some battery consideration when location is required, hopefully not letting the application go rogue.

Push Notifications

What can I say? It’s been done, and been available since the last iPhone OS 3.0 release. I think it’s just put here for good measure. Once again, it is a “reaction” and not true multitasking.

Local Notifications

This is simply the same thing as your “scheduled task” or “timer” for those familiar with the terminologies. This, too, isn’t having your entire application open, but simply just a small part of it that you register to a scheduler to run it when required.

Task Completion

This is slightly interesting because it isn’t a “reaction” to something, but letting a “thread”, “process”, or keeping with this post’s terminology “a small part of the app” running in the background, and when that finishes it just automatically closes the application. This has potential for having a rogue application that simply just continuously have an infinite loop to keep the application open. I’m curious to find out how much is exposed, or only certain services like “downloading” and “uploading” are available.

Fast App Switching

This is ALSO not true multitasking, where the application once lost focus will save its state, close itself, and not “run” at all. Only after reopening, the state is restored, and the application is once resumed again. So in fact, anything running will have to be resumed, for example connection to the internet and so on. This means that it does not actually continue to run at all. However, with what was covered in the previous 6 ways of multitasking, you can very well achieve seamless “multitasking” with “Task Completion”, “Local Notifications” and so on.

Summary

What does this all mean? Steve Jobs has redefined what multitasking actually means and converted the meaning to a consumer terminology. Consumers do not want true multitasking, but a pseudo-version of it with all the benefits of multitasking, and also the benefits of a fast and responsive OS. But does this mean that developers will have more to worry about, trying to work around what’s available to them to create a seamless so-called “multitasking” application? Most of what Apple has announced isn’t anything new at all to the iPhone OS, it is simply just exposing it with a tight grip, disallowing developers to go rogue.

Do note that all this right now is speculation based on what makes sense to me until I actually see the SDK.

Source: JustinLee.SG – High-Level Analysis of iPhone OS 4.0 Multitasking