First off, we have to clarify the concept of multitasking. On a desktop, notebook, netbook, etc., you will frequently have multiple programs open at a time and often more than one is visible on the screen. In most cases, these programs are actively running (usually with priority given to the application in focus) and using some processing cycles. Sometimes the background applications do need to use resources, such as an instant messaging client or music player. Sometimes they don’t, such as when you are actively playing a game but left a browser window open in the background.

The misconception is that Android handles all these processes the same way, forcing them to fight it out in a cage match with the winner getting processor cycles. Fortunately, that is not the case.

Unnecessary Processing
Most of the time the limited screen real estate means you don’t need background processes running for applications that don’t currently show any UI. Essentially, the processing associated with an activity ends, but the activity remains in memory until that memory is either needed or the activity is back in focus (obviously this is a bit of a simplification). When an activity goes into the background like this, it typically does any saving necessary. That allows the memory to be recovered aggressively, if needed, without creating delay at the time of recovery.

Some iPhone apps actually have similar behavior, but they store their state to the phone’s storage rather than the memory. This allows you to reopen an app, starting from the same point you ended it. Clearly, both Apple and iPhone developers see this ability to quickly switch tasks as valuable, despite that it isn’t “built in” to iPhone OS.

Necessary Processing
The other key situation is something called a service, and this is where the differences between Android and iPhone OS are most noticeable. A service is a process that does not directly have UI or an activity associated with it. A process for handling the reception of instant messages is a good example. You don’t want to sit on a screen all day to wait for new messages. You want to be able to check your email, browse the web, or play a game. The service can run in the background and unobtrusively notify you of new messages.

Apple’s Situation
Apple sees the need for some apps to have background processes; the music player is a good example. Apple just hasn’t fully opened the door to letting the third-party developers run background processes. Instead, they allow for push notifications.

But push notifications are not the complete answer. They have an extremely limited 256-byte maximum payload. They are not secure. They require extra infrastructure. They overwrite each other. They are designed for text only. The application cannot manipulate the push notification data if it is not running. And, worst of all, push notifications are extremely intrusive! Implemented properly, push notifications could be the correct solution for some situations, but they currently present a bad user experience and have limited value to developers.

Additional Uses
Besides music players, instant messengers, and SSH connections, location-based services like Google Latitude are virtually useless without background processes. Another example of a background service is common in feed readers such as NewsRob. While you don’t have the app open in the foreground, it is still able to periodically fetch new feed items. That means you can later open that app without an internet connection and still read your favorite feeds. With iPhone, you have to actively open each app and tell it to cache the data for offline reading, wait, and then repeat for each app you might want to use (such as during a plane ride).

Even if you disagree
Finally, even if you believe nothing of what I have written and still believe that background processes waste a huge amount of processor cycles and drain your battery, then you should ask yourself how the Nexus One has a battery life comparable to the iPhone’s when it has a faster processor that is pushing more than twice as many pixels, it has more RAM, it runs third-party background applications… not to mention the battery is user-replaceable ($25 for an Android battery; roughly four times that for Apple to replace an iPhone battery). It must be from HTC stealing Apple’s innovation again *sigh*.

QR Code

Now, imaging technology has improved and we can represent data across two axes. This gives us for more data in the same amount of space. Instead of just a few numbers, we can represent hundreds of characters. The two formats I most commonly see are as technically different as they are philosophically different.

QR Codes are the type I see the most. They represent data directly without color. They can be read with extremely cheap equipment and are common in Japan. There are no licensing fees associated with QR codes.

Microsoft Tag

The differences are numerous. Though the QR Code format is patented, you do not have to pay for a license. Anyone is able to generate one and code for interpreting the data is freely available. Microsoft Tags do not current cost money, but they could (and most likely will) cost money in the future. Since Microsoft Tags have to hit a server that you do not control, there are three big things to consider: 1) Microsoft has access to your analytics data, 2) they can charge you a recurring fee to ensure they don’t reroute your tag to another site, 3) the tags are useless without an internet connection. Basically, QR Codes are open whereas Microsoft Tags are closed.

That being said, there is one major plus to Microsoft Tags and that is their ability to be read. Though they require a bit better of an imaging device, most mobile phone cameras are very capable and can read a smaller Microsoft Tag than a QR Code. The following is a smaller version of each of the above tags. I shrank each tag as small as I could while still being readable with my Nexus One.

Related to that is the inherent error correction in each image. I had assumed they would be pretty similar, so I am glad I tested this. I found that the Microsoft Tag was also much more capable of recovering the data when the image was imperfect. I’m not sure if this is simply because of the design (the lines I drew generally didn’t blank out complete triangles) or because the Microsoft Tag doesn’t have to represent all the data, meaning that it is representing less data in the same amount of space.

Because it’s my nature to prefer open solutions to closed ones, I definitely prefer QR Codes, but I did find it interesting to see how capable the Microsoft Tags were. One key difference, however, is that QR Codes can represent data other than just URLs. Regardless, I think Microsoft will make a big push with their format, and it may even become fairly common.

While comparing them, I saw a monitor that looked a little glossy, so I thought I’d change the desktop background to black to see just how glossy it was.

I right-clicked on the desktop and didn’t see an obvious “Change Desktop Background” or “Change Wallpaper” option. There was an option for “Next desktop background,” which just switched to another picture as the current background was apparently set to be a slideshow, and the only semi-likely option: “Personalize.” Guess what? Personalize was not the correct choice.

At that point, I didn’t care enough and moved on to look at some other monitors, but I became curious today and looked online. A simple search revealed 24 million results, one of which was Microsoft’s solution.

Open Desktop Background by clicking the Start button and clicking Control Panel. In the search box, type desktop background, and then click Change desktop background.

Microsoft actually has a video to demonstrate because it is overly complicated. Vista was terrible, so Windows 7 doesn’t have to do a great job to seem impressive, but I expected a better user experience.

For reference, in OS X you would right-click and pick “Change desktop background…” and in Ubuntu (Gnome) you would right-click and pick “Change Desktop Background.” In Vista you would right-click and pick “Personalize” and then pick “Desktop Background.”

Overview
Since most people aren’t likely to read this entire post, here’s a quick summary of my expectations as far as hardware.

Faster Processor
The iPhone should have an improved processor. It may be the same A4 that is in the iPad, though it would probably be underclocked to 800MHz. It’s very unlikely that the iPhone would have a processor running at 1GHz because that means it would feel like it is outperforming the iPad because of the resolution differences.

Better Screen
The first thing nearly everyone notices about many new devices is the screen, and Apple really should improve the resolution of the iPhone. 320×480 is good, but it is no longer great. Unfortunately, more pixels causes problems. For starters, it means more processing has to go on for the display, which decreases battery life and can decrease performance (especially in OpenGL-based games). Also, Apple hasn’t had a native way of supporting multiple resolutions (and can’t just use the iPad version of apps, due to the physical size differences), so the phone would also have to upscale apps, which can look bad (unless they take a nice multiple of the current pixel format) and would use more processing power. So, an increased pixel density ultimately means lower performance and lower battery life. Therefore, I see it as unlikely.

More RAM
Apple would be absolutely foolish to not increase the amount of RAM in the next iteration of the iPhone, so it’s really a question of how much of an increase. My hope is for it to have 512MB, matching many other leading phones, and significantly improving performance. Plus, 512MB means that they can support multitasking in one form or another, even if it only amounts to widgets. Somehow, I think that 384MB is pretty likely. It will give a big boost to performance and be plenty for the iPhone if multitasking continues to be unsupported for 3rd party developers. Plus, it means bigger profit margins for Apple.

Buttons
Before the iPad was announced, I really expected Apple to add a few buttons. These can be dedicated parts of the touch screen, so a hardware change isn’t necessary. Having a menu button means that a menu doesn’t have to waste screen space on every app you use. However, having less screen space on an iPhone means people are more likely to see the need for an iPad, so there isn’t much incentive for Apple. A dedicated search button would be very effective because it means that Apple can have your homescreen be the middle “page,” with other pages both left and right instead of just right. This would increase the efficiency of selecting an app that isn’t on your home screen by 50%. Of course, I doubt a search button will be included either.

Customizable Home Screen
I think this one is pretty much a guarantee; it’s just a matter of extent. The new iPhone will surely support desktop backgrounds and probably allow you to place icons without having them forced toward the top left. Moving and interactive desktop backgrounds that can be created by 3rd parties seems very unlikely.

Multitasking
I definitely wouldn’t hold my breath for true multitasking. It requires better specs all around and changes the user flow. If the iPad doesn’t have multitasking, the iPhone won’t either. Widget support would be nice though….

Conclusion
I see the next version of the iPhone as being a very logical and calculated step in the same direction Apple is already going because that is working well for them and the iPad did not significantly deviate from the current iPhone versions. Incremental hardware increases are likely, but the software changes aren’t as obvious. What are your thoughts?

Here’s the disclaimer: I did my best to fairly show the differences between the screens of a Nexus One and an iPhone 3G. Both phones were set to maximum brightness and were indirectly lit in an attempt to avoid glare. The Nexus One has a much greater tendency to reflect light than the iPhone. The camera (Canon 7D) was set to output to JPG because I didn’t want to subconsciously favor one display over the other when processing from RAW. The full-sized images are around 7MB each, so I created a resized version (1024×683 from 5184×3456) and, in some cases, a detailed version. The detailed version is a crop from the original image with no resizing. I just took two 512×683 crops and put them together. I didn’t label them because the Nexus One is always on the left and the iPhone is always on the right. Images embedded in this post are 400 pixels wide and link to the larger versions.

Home Screen

The iPhone’s home screen looks rather bland compared to the Nexus One. The icons are fairly similar, though you can see that the Nexus One icons are smaller and varying shapes (some iPhone 3rd party icons are different shapes, but transparency is not properly handled by the iPhone OS, so these only look transparent with a black background).

The Web – New York Times

For most people, the web browser will be the most used feature of a smartphone. These photos illustrate the difference that a higher resolution makes. Though the displays are close to the same physical size, small fonts are unreadable on the iPhone. I recommend viewing the full sized version of the detailed photo.

The Web – Image

Both phones are browsing a photo on Flickr, but you can see that the iPhone can’t display the full image at its native size (note that the Nexus One is actually zoomed in a bit on the image because the image is only 500px wide). The difference in the shadows is probably the most noticeable part of this comparison. The Nexus One appears to display oranges a bit brighter than it should. The iPhone loses detail in darker parts of the photo.

Maps – Satellite View

Though both displays a very usable, the Nexus One looks particularly crisp compared to the iPhone here.

Maps – Traffic View

I had a particularly challenging time getting these views to be zoomed identically across both displays, so don’t put too much emphasis on these. I did notice that the iPhone didn’t report construction on its maps application, but the overall data was basically the same. Again, the Nexus One appears much sharper.

PDF

Though you’re unlikely to read significant amounts on either phone, this PDF comparison shows the advantages of a higher pixel density. This also makes me question the recently-unveiled iPad as a serious reading device (its long side is only 1024 pixels, 224 more than the Nexus One, despite being much larger).

Apps – TV.com

As you can see, the TV.com app has a different interface on iPhone OS vs. Android. The Android version is able to show a lot more data at one time, though part of that is due to not needing a static menu on screen. During video playback, the actual video doesn’t take up the full width on the Nexus One. Here, you can see the greater range of colors on the Nexus One, particularly in the detailed photo. I also noticed that the iPhone’s black was a bit blue and not as dark as the Nexus One’s black. The Nexus One picked up a bit of glare but was still very usable.

Final Thoughts
One thing that really stood out during this test was how much more the Nexus One screen shows, and I don’t just mean in pixel count. Since Android has support for more than one button, applications do not have to waste screen space by displaying a menu. In most cases, that means displaying an extra row worth of information.

The Nexus One definitely has a more significant problem with glare, but it also has much darker blacks. It is a little over saturated around orange colors, though not significantly so. The iPhone screen does a good job of diffusing light, but the blacks never look fully black. The colors seem well balanced with less range, but the lower resolution really hurts the iPhone when it is next to the Nexus One.

Shower Power
Although Apple hasn’t outright said so, the iPad is probably very water resistant. That means you can take it in the shower with you and have it play music, so you can bless the world with your wonderful shower voice as you sing along in perfect tune. Have no idea what tune means? That’s okay! Just use the T-Pain auto-tune app!

Fat Chat
The rates of obesity in the US seem to have begun plateauing. That means we need a new way to burn even fewer calories. If you thought walking to your computer desk was hard work, fret no more! You can use the iPad from your couch (or kitchen)! Perhaps more important is that you no longer have to expend all that energy pressing down physical keys, so you can cut that calorie-burning typing from 30 calories an hour to 15!

Shopper Stopper
Being very “green” is an important part of feeling better than everyone around you, so avoid harming a recyclable piece of paper and instead bring your iPad charged with power from a coal power plant. It can feature your shopping list and pictures of what items look like (in case you can’t remember what an apple looks like when it doesn’t have a bite already taken out). As a bonus, you can use it to explain to other shoppers how they are pissing you off by blocking your ability to shop quickly.

Crime Time
Ever walk through a sketchy part of town at night and feel like you’d be much safer if you had one of those big, black police flashlights? No worries! Just download one of the many “flashlight” apps on your iPad and hold it out in front of you. Why would a criminal risk robbing you when you’re clearly lighting the way with a $500-$830 flashlight?

Camper Pamper
Ever go camping and wish you weren’t camping? Well, now you can almost pretend you aren’t by watching pre-recorded videos that you’ve re-encoded and synced on your 4:3 device. It’s just like watching TV at home! If a bear attacks you, just download a picture of a forest fire and hold it out in front of you. You’re guaranteed to be safe. As an added bonus, the iPad doubles as a Frisbee when the battery dies!

Now that you’re thinking positively, feel free to add your own suggestions!

If you haven’t heard, the Nexus One (N1) has been released. It’s the newest Android-based phone, built by HTC and being “pushed” by Google. Unfortunately, ordering one has caused trouble for many people, myself included.

Rather than paying $400 for an iPhone via AT&T, I thought getting the $180 N1 would be a great deal, especially since I could switch to T-Mobile and pay just $80 a month for the plan (less expensive than either Verizon or AT&T). Unfortunately, I filled out the form and got the error: “You are not eligible for T-Mobile service at this time.”

Sadly, that’s all the info Google provides, other than comforting me with the option of buying it straight up for $530. I have no idea why I am ineligible. My roommate has a G1 on T-Mobile, so service is available. I have never had a contract with T-Mobile, so it’s not a matter of being an existing or past customer ineligible for upgrade. I’ve checked to make sure I can transfer my phone number, and it’s eligible for transfer. Why am I not eligible?

Update! Success!
I did it again and changed two things, and it worked. I’m not sure which of these two mattered, but here they are in the hope that they’ll help someone else:

1) Per eperor’s suggestion, I asked for a new phone number.

2) I changed my service area to downtown Seattle (where I work) rather than my home address.

This worked for me; good luck to everyone else!

<link rel="image_src" href="http://example.com/logo.png" />

Just put that tag in the head portion of your HTML, and the image specified (in this case “logo.png”) will be the new default (and only) choice for Facebook sharing. There are a few things that you should know though. First, Facebook caches these images, so you may not see the immediate change. I’m not sure exactly how long the cache is, but I saw changes in under 24 hours on a site I was working on. The other really big thing to know about is that Facebook has specific rules for the image:

The thumbnail’s width or height must be at least 50 pixels, and cannot exceed 130×110 pixels. The ratio of both height divided by width and width divided by height (w / h, h / w) cannot exceed 3.0. For example, an image of 126×39 pixels will not be displayed, as the ratio of width divided by height is greater than 3.0 (126 / 39 = 3.23). Images will be resized proportionally.

That’s per the developer wiki. Although some other sites also make use of the tag and specified image, your image must meet these requirements for it to work with Facebook sharing. If your image does not meet these requirements, it will not show up at all, and no other options will show up either. People will not be able to select any thumbnail when sharing your site.

It’s also worth noting that Facebook makes use of the traditional meta tags (title and description), so you should be sure to include those on your pages. I know many people have gotten out of the habit of adding them in because they were most commonly used with search indexing, but most search engines use context from your actual content instead of those tags.

Unfortunately, I found out a few issues that have convinced me to hold off. The biggest issue is that Apple seems to cover their products in a ridiculous gloss coating. It looks great until you realize your monitor is behaving more like a mirror than like a screen. I had that issue with my previous laptop, feeling excited about how amazing the screen looked until I tried using it with a decent amount of natural light. Clearly, many of the expected users are going to be photographers, videographers, graphic designers, and others who need excellent color quality and thus prefer natural light. I see this problem on the 24″ iMac I use at work, and reviews suggest it is even worse on the 27″ version. This reason alone makes me hesitate.

The next big issue is price. You have to expect to pay a premium for an Apple product; they’re in the business of selling hardware. However, you also pay more for the product to be an all-in-one solution (i.e., the hardware components reside in the screen). This is really great and leaves your computer setup very clean, but it’s not one of my reasons for wanting the computer, so I would be paying more for something I don’t care a whole lot about, and that always gets me looking at how ridiculous of a system I could build. Apple needs to make a system between the Mini and the Mac Pro and then let me buy it with a 27″ monitor (or two).

I also dislike the way Apple leaves out some specs on their site. How good is the webcam? What’s the contrast ratio? How fast is the refresh rate? Does it smell like a green apple or a red one? Some questions are clearly more important than others, but the tech specs page ought to give me all the details I want, and it doesn’t.

And why does it not have some of the basic ports that are common on crappy $300 systems? For instance, there’s no external SATA port, so my 1tb external SATA drive that I use for backing up my laptop and desktop becomes a lot less useful (though at least my laptop has an e-SATA port… and an HDMI port for that matter). Every non-Apple computer I’ve seen in the past 5-10 years has had an all-in-one card reader, but Apple’s iMac is just now coming with a single SD card slot. Sure, I can connect an external card reader that costs $10 and can read a billion different types of memory cards, but why should I have to do that on a computer that seems designed for people who will be using various types of memory cards from their electronic equipment?

You can’t even get this with a BluRay drive. I guess Apple’s desire to make you use iTunes is stronger than the logic of including a good optical drive in a computer that would clearly make a good entertainment machine.

And the thing that really gets me is the keyboard. WTF, mate? Seriously, I think they purposely try to hide the full-size shots of it so you don’t realize they took the regular keyboard and chopped off everything to the right of the return key (yes, the home, end, page up, etc. keys are gone). Then they squished the arrow keys into the space where the right control key was. A crappy keyboard for such a nice system… how terrible.

Maybe I’ll get one at some point, but these issues are definitely significant enough to keep me from buying one now. I can build an incredibly nice system for the cost of the iMac….

I am working on integrating Delicious within an existing application, so I decided to create a test account. That’s when I first ran into issues with the Yahoo integration because I was required to go through the ridiculous Yahoo registration process instead of the previous Delicious sign up. After trying a million different usernames and getting the initial CAPTCHA wrong, I had an account and my testing could begin.

My script was not successfully adding a bookmark, so I tested it directly in the browser and realized I couldn’t log in. I tried the username and the username@yahoo.com, but neither worked. I was able to sign in via Yahoo, so I know I was using the right password. I tried my old Delicious account from 2006 that I never associated with Yahoo, and it worked fine.

I ran into a thread of people having the same issue, and then I stumbled across a Yahoo developer forum thread that clued me in on the comments that appeared in the blog post about the integration. A comment from “Chris” revealed a bit more:

Apologies. It looks like our help pages didn’t get updated.
For accounts created with a yahoo ID, you can use pretty much the same api’s except:
1) You need to use OAuth, as per http://developer.yahoo.com/oauth/, with Delicious as a scope
2) use /v2 as the path rather than /v1
3) You can use http rather than https

The problem with this (well, one problem with this) is that it requires two different ways of handling user authentication for the same service. There is currently no indication of best practices (e.g., should the user self-identify as being a standard Delicious account holder vs. a Yahoo account user or do we check submitted IDs to determine which method should be used to access the API?). There is also no indication of whether developers should expect to support two types of IDs forever.

The biggest reason this is so frustrating is because an API change so significant should be planned months in advance with plenty of forewarning for all developers. Instead, the effect to the API isn’t even mentioned in announcement blog post nor is anything posted in the API docs. Disappointed wouldn’t accurately describe how I felt when I stumbled into these issues….