Here Comes the Future of the iPhone

I know, I know.  So many of you were waiting patiently for thursday to check out Digital Gravitas for my report on the iPhone OS 4.0 Keynote, only to be disappointed by a lack of anything.  Unfortunately I was at 35,000 feet during the keynote’s proceedings and was not about to pay $8 for GoGo Wireless on Delta for a 2 hour flight.  I’ve been on vacation so I took a break from blogging to get some R&R.  Anyway, the dust has settled from the Apple keynote and OS 4.0 has been previewed.  There were a lot of big announcements but the most important, and thus the largest portion of my post, goes to feature #1: Multitasking support.

Yes folks.  You are seeing it correctly.  The iPhone will now support third party multitasking on all iPhone 3GS models and iPads (unfortunately 3G and original iPhone owners don’t have the horsepower or RAM to run the new feature).  Apple has spent a long, long, long time mulling over the multitasking question.  They first were strongly against it because it would adversely effect system performance, drain battery life, and could expose the system to malware.  Not only that, but Apple saw multitasking options available on other mobile operating systems as inelegant and poorly implemented.  We’re looking at you Windows Mobile 6, and you’re blasted task manager.  This point is more significant than many seem to understand.  A recent editorial on Engadget makes the very strong point that we cannot call mobile multitasking a success until it is done right – without completely depleting battery life and slowing the phone to a crawl.

Next Snow Leopard Revision to have OpenGL 3.0 Support

In the digital arms race between Apple and Microsoft, we usually have a stalemate.  People often try to say Windows is better or OSX is better, but in the end, they’re really virtually the same.  To a point.  In the end it’s mostly about applications where Windows has a larger amount, though OSX’s is arguably more vibrant.  Who knows?  The real disputes between Windows and OSX usually comes to hardware support and underlying technology, where Microsoft has gained a new edge in Vista and Windows 7.

One of the underlying technologies that makes Vista and 7 seem very appealing is the use and rapid enhancement of the DirectX API suite.  DirectX combines numerous Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that allow developers to automate their access to hardware and other systems.  These include sound APIs, a 2D API called DirectDraw, and the 3D graphics API called Direct3D.  It is this last API that we usually refer to when discussing DirectX, and as such I will simply call it by the abbreviation DX11, being the 11th version.  DX has received many enhancements rapidly over the years and has since Windows 2000 been the driving force behind evolutions in graphics card technology.  It was DX6 that first allowed for texture creation and geometry processing, DX7 allowed the first use of transform and lighting through hardware, DX8 introduced the very first programmable shaders, and DX9, 10, and 11 have added dramatically vital new features to improve graphics development like Unified Shaders, GPGPU processing, and tessellation.