furbo.org · Brain surgeons

So far best take I’ve read on why not allowing background processes on the iPhone is a good thing; backed by actual experience and everything. (He wrote a background processing app for a jailbroken iPhone and the battery died in hours). The idea that your app could register for getting launched and checking something in the background periodically when the phone happens to be online for some other reason is great, I hope Apple implements it.

Gruber mentions the AIM app demoed during the SDK event and how it would benefit from background processing. However, much of what you were looking to gain by running AIM in the background could be achieved by keeping the connection online on the server side instead, and pushing messages sent while AIM was off on the iPhone when it is started again (or when doing the kind of background processing mentioned on furby). (Update: that’s actually what they do)