Apple’s Tablet Apps Will Live and Die by One Nerdy Thing

by Brad Grier on October 29, 2009

in QuickHit, Via Posterous

The following post is a QuickHit(tm) -- an article or post I found online and thought was important enough to share directly with you. Of course, you'll see my thoughts or opinions prepended or appended to this post, otherwise I'm just scraping content, and that's not the intent.

Some days I miss my Apple Newton Message Pad. It was bulky and clunky, ran on a whole swack of AA batteries, hummed at a high frequency that only my dogs really appreciated, but it was cool. It was portable, and it worked.

Apparently it also had an operating system that even the current iPhone can't beat when it comes to Garbage Collection.

For an Apple Tablet to be a hit, it will have to be more than a big-screen iPhone. And the difference between a lithe, touch-based Mac and a giant, lame iPhone comes down to one crucial nerd-factor: memory management.

apple tablet

Memory management is boring to talk about. It's also boring to do. You're probably half-asleep just reading this sentence, but that's sort of the point; developers hate memory management. When they build iPhone apps, they have to control the iPhone's
memory: what goes in, what gets stored, what comes out. When
your program closes, your app is supposed to give back all that memory
to the OS, so that it your computer can use it for other apps. If your
program doesn't give back memory to the system, it's called a "leak." Leaky programs are bad; they make things crash. But it wasn't always this way.

Permalink

...more


You've just read a QuickHit(tm). Thanks! And don't forget to leave your thoughts in the comments.


Related Posts with Thumbnails
Like this? Share it please!
  • Twitter
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • RSS
  • Suggest to Techmeme via Twitter
  • del.icio.us
  • LinkedIn
  • Posterous
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon

Related posts:

  1. 6 Things I want to see in an Apple Tablet
  2. Apple iPhone and iPod Touch viewers needed
  3. How the Apple Tablet can really succeed
  4. Awesome free iPhone app creates sales for other iphone apps
  5. Apple Tablet prediction as a game


Leave a Comment

Thesis Theme for WordPress:  Options Galore and a Helpful Support Community
Creative Commons License
blog.bradgrier.com by Brad Grier is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.
Based on a work at blog.bradgrier.com.
Get Adobe Flash playerPlugin by wpburn.com wordpress themes
ss_blog_claim=44aa26329ed37448560e7d4275ad1ef0