Macs In Life

Let’s try this again. For some reason it seemed that the OS 4 coverage that I was watching did not cover the whole event. There were parts that were left out. Important parts. I was not impressed by the event or by what Apple had in store for OS 4. Once the event was posted by Apple I watched the keynote and was shocked to see what I had missed. Upon further review I am now quite happy with what is to come this summer and fall for the iPhone and iPad respectively.

I am not going to go over the event point by point. Rather, I will hit on the points that I will find the most useful.

The most productive addition to the new OS for me is going to be the upgrade to mail.(yes, I know, multitasking should be first, but not for me) And, it is not the universal inbox. What I will find most useful is going to be the ability to open an attachment in a native program. This is going to be huge in terms of productivity. I will be able to attach files that I have created on my iMac and edit them on my iPad. Currently you have to cable sync the iPad to the computer and import the file.

Now comes multitasking. Which is really a combination of fast app switching and background operations. Honestly, this is all that I will need. Couple this with local push notifications and I’m all set. Currently Apple uses a server to do notifications. With 4.0 some of the notifications will be able to be generated by the app on the device. The task completion is going to be huge too. If I write a massive rant the size of “War and Peace” it will take a while to post. Now I have to keep that app open until it’s finished loading. Not so with the new OS. The app will continue to do its thing in the background even if you switch to another app. Most of the time the app in the background just stops and holds whatever it is doing and waits, not using any cpu, until it is called on again. Certain functions will be allowed to run in the background. These would be VoiP, location, push notification, task completion and audio. To see which apps are still running( or waiting) all you have to do is double click the home button and a dock appears with all of the open apps. You can scroll through them and turn them off by holding on the icon until the little x appears. Just like if you want to delete or move and app, only this time it just closes them.

And then there will be folders. By moving an app icon on top of another icon it will create a little stack or folder. It looks like you can have 9 apps in a folder. The folders will name themselves by what category they come from in the app store or you can name them yourself. This will do wonders for organizing my pages of apps. It will also allow me to have over 2,000 apps on a device. Maybe not such a good thing.

These are just the points that I think will increase my productivity. Let us know what you think about the new OS.