|
 Originally Posted by skinneejay
I am going to feed the troll for a minute and agree with him to a certain point. ( Ducks down)  Let me get this out of the way first I love the palm pre and wouldn't trade this phone for the world! When your apps are in card mode they are not truely live and updating.( hopefully we all can agree on this) I noticed this when I had opened up a web page if close it into card mode and go and do something else like say bring up contacts the web page is not loading up in card mode. ( That we all can agree on too correct?) I am not sure if other apps are live and updating but for sure web pages do not load up in card mode. So what he is saying does have some truth. I think what he really wanted to say was that cards are not live and updating but just open and static and become alive again once the program is brought to the front. Maybe I am wrong but who knows. If I am someone please let me know. I would live it if web pages loaded while in card mode.
In computer science, several process management paradigms fall under the definition of "Multitasking". Several points are common in these definitions:
- On a single core cpu multitasking presents the illusion that multiple programs are running simultaneously.
- Running programs don't need to be aware that other programs are running.
- Running programs have no access to the data of other programs unless those programs have specifically arranged to acces each other's data.
[[These bullets are taken from the book, 'Computer Architecture' by Nicholas Butler]]
What differentiates multitasking from something like TealOS is that in TealOS there is no illusion or even claim that apps are running simltaneously. Images of the last screen are saved and manipulated on screen to provide some of the experience of WebOS. However, in WebOS many of the apps continue to update when in card view. Further, if an app is running (doing some updating to its state, then put into card view, and restored to full screen some time later, WebOS apps do not typically just pick up where they left off when first put into card view. Many of the apps have done quite a bit of processing while in card view. However, WebOS does provide notifications to apps to let them know they have gone into card view or gone full screen. In some cases the app developer has written code to halt the execution of the app or just stopped updating the screen. In either of these case, the application still resides in pirmary memory, still has an active state, still consumes CPU cycles (even a blocked/sleeping app consumes cycles while the OS looks at the app to see if it should share out to it some processing time). Hence by all classic computer science meaning, the app is still running.
Palm would not be able to make the claim of multitasking (without risking litigation) if WebOS didn't conform to these definitions. Your claims in the quote above are not valid. Web pages do load in card view, screens do update in card view. Howeve the API includes nitifications to apps which alert apps they have gone into card view. The app can then stop updating the screen, this saves battery, however just because an app is not updating the screen doesn't mean that it's not running. Several apps still continue to update the screen even in card view, e.g. messaging (in card view the cursor still flashes), App Catalog (if you initiate a download then go to cardview, the progress bar continues to update), and there are many more examples.
Hence, anyone who tries to back up the claim that WebOS does not multitask would be hard pressed to do so. They are the ones with the burden of proof.
Besides all that, WebOS runs on Linux. The Linux core is multitasking. It's not possible to strip the multitasking from the core. Palm would have had to write a drop-in replacement for that core. It would be much easier to write their own OS from the ground up rather than trying to make a single processing core be a drop-in-replacement for the existing Linux OS core.
|
|
|