[p51]

Getting tired of having to manage apps to make sure a few stay open. Is this addressed in 10.2. If so, when is it being released. It's taken forever! This OS launched in January (WTF)

Posted via CB10

[jason9900]

It's there but Shao did a write up on it and apparently it is way too hard to implement so there are no apps for it

Posted via CB10

[p51]

Thanks for the answer. Typical. As much as I like this phone, it's shortcomings are becoming more & more glaring.

Posted via CB10

[Paintedeyes]

the write up explains it real well. The way BlackBerry implemented headless apps is terrible. From what I gather form it anything done in cascades can't be headless. there would be a tone of code rewriting to be done.

[p51]

Which it too bad. This may lead to me switching.


Posted via CB10

[BBPandy]

If you read the comments to Shao's article you see that not all Developers agree with Shao

Posted via CB10

[Playbookjoe]

Yes. I for one am happy with they way they did it. If they can keep going it can turn into a very powerful system.

Posted via CB10

[c_legaspi]

I think headless apps will get dropped. Just a gut feeling and my opinion so I won't hold my breath out for it. I'll use my q10 for what it is and has and then move on to he next big thing what ever phone that it may

Posted via CB10

[Bor Navas]

I don't like the idea of headless apps anyway, what's the point of having active frames then, if you can have apps running in the background and you may forget / don't know about them? I like the way it is now...

Posted via my z10 - BBM channel pin C000F331C

[app_Developer]

Getting tired of having to manage apps to make sure a few stay open. Is this addressed in 10.2. If so, when is it being released. It's taken forever! This OS launched in January (WTF)

What apps would you most like to see as headless apps?

[bobauckland]

Anyone arguing against properly implemented headless apps, is arguing against functionality, progress and ease of use.
Communications apps, functionality apps, almost every app can be bettered by being run headless.

This is exponentially more important when an OS is so resource hungry and inefficient that it can't run more than 8 active frames at a time. Without headless apps in addition, and since this OS auto closes active frames when more than 8 are opened, BB10 quickly becomes a major problem.

[Whyareallthegoodnamestaken]

I bought BeBuzz when it first came out and I've not used it since because of how annoying it is to mange the active frames to keep it open (as the OP described). It just isn't a BlackBerry without BeBuzz being headless.

Posted via CB10

[p51]

Bebuzz. I use the different alerts ALL the time.


Posted via CB10

[p51]

Headless apps should have been baked in from the start. 10 months later we still don't have it. That's inexcusable. It becomes one more thing to monitor on a system that's supposed to make me more efficient (the irony).

Posted via CB10

[BBPandy]

I do want headless apps but I don't want most apps to be headless. Most don't need to be actively running at all times. BB10 does allow them to be called if need at a certain time or by a certain trigger ect. Having an app running in the background when it's not needed is very inefficient.

Also, what other mobile OS let's you actively run 8 apps at a time? Even if the limit was 16 I suspect there would be people complaining that it wasn't 20

Posted via CB10

[bobauckland]

I do want headless apps but I don't want most apps to be headless. Most don't need to be actively running at all times. BB10 does allow them to be called if need at a certain time or by a certain trigger ect. Having an app running in the background when it's not needed is very inefficient.

Also, what other mobile OS let's you actively run 8 apps at a time? Even if the limit was 16 I suspect there would be people complaining that it wasn't 20

Posted via CB10

You're not actively running anything.
You run a game, active frame it, swap to something else, what happens?
Game pauses.
When you come back you can unpause.
I think you'll find most other major OSes, in fact all of them, allow similar functioning.
Except they have better headless support and more apps.
Multitasking on BB10 is only much lauded on CrackBerry and when people have invested money in BB10. To everyone else it's very very inferior to other OSes in terms of pure functionality.

[katesbb]

You're not actively running anything.
You run a game, active frame it, swap to something else, what happens?
Game pauses.

Many apps apparently continue to run, as they send notifications to the Hub when "in the background."

I'm just not sure why BlackBerry has complicated this so much. I realize they want a system that efficiently manages memory and battery power, but even now I have open Weather, Twitter, CB, BeBuzz and Clock. All seem to be running constantly, background or not, updating their Active Frame and so on. And yet it doesn't seem to have any appreciable impact on my battery life.

I really think 90% of our "headless app" needs would be addressed by:

1) Let us "lock" an app so it isn't closed unintentionally by the user, or closed by the OS when opening a 9th app (have the OS close a non-locked app instead)

2) Let us flag apps to "autostart," so we can be assured something like BeBuzz is always running

That may not cover every need, but I think it would address a lot of the actual needs people complain about, and it doesn't require developers to adapt to what sounds like a very complex headless app programming framework.

[BBPandy]

You're not actively running anything.
You run a game, active frame it, swap to something else, what happens?
Game pauses.
When you come back you can unpause.
I think you'll find most other major OSes, in fact all of them, allow similar functioning.
Except they have better headless support and more apps.
Multitasking on BB10 is only much lauded on CrackBerry and when people have invested money in BB10. To everyone else it's very very inferior to other OSes in terms of pure functionality.

Perhaps you can teach my iPhone about it's superior multitasking because as it stands I find it quite annoying....though I do enjoy playing Asphalt 8 on it.

Posted via CB10

[ankush77]

It will not completely

[notfanboy]

Multitasking on BB10 is only much lauded on CrackBerry and when people have invested money in BB10. To everyone else it's very very inferior to other OSes in terms of pure functionality.

This is so true. It's like a piece of dogma, a mantra in these parts, that BB10 multitasking is superior to any other mobile OS. When in fact, there are dozens of useful capabilities in Android that is simply not possible in BB10 because of its crippled multitasking.

[app_Developer]

I agree that Android's multitasking model is ultimately much smarter for both developers and end users. I would say the same about iOS7.

But, we have what we have in BB10. The question I have is if you could pick 3 apps that you wish would take advantage of headless operation in 10.2, which would they be?

I hear BeBuzz. What else?

[BBPandy]

Viber (or like minded IM Apps)
It's not that I'm against headless apps. I'm just glad BlackBerry is controlling what apps can be headless because there are so many apps that do not need to be running in the background

Posted via CB10

[katesbb]

This is so true. It's like a piece of dogma, a mantra in these parts, that BB10 multitasking is superior to any other mobile OS. When in fact, there are dozens of useful capabilities in Android that is simply not possible in BB10 because of its crippled multitasking.

Apples and oranges.

I think Android has to split an app into UI and background process, since Android pauses the UI portion when it's backgrounded. It's efficient sure, but it's also necessary because of the way the OS works.

BB10 doesn't seem to automatically pause anything. I assume it's up to the developer, as apps like BeBuzz keep going regardless of what's in the foreground. And I'm not seeing any penalty in ordinary use with my Z10 when keeping multiple apps open. It's just annoying to always have to be so careful to not let a critical app close.

Which is why 10.2's approach to "headless apps" confuses me. It seems like they hired a bunch of Android developers to do it, forgetting that BB10 works with a different paradigm. The 10.2 approach is very Android-ish, when I'm not sure it needed to be, at least not for 90% of the needs many of us are asking for.

[app_Developer]

The reason it is similar to Android (sort of) is because the BlackBerry engineers have finally realized what Palm, Microsoft, Apple, and Google engineers all realized years ago: these devices can't write out dirty pages and yet they have to be able to run an arbitrary number of third party applications.

The original multitasking scheme in on playbook was naive. The 8 app limit was step 1 of recovering from that decision, but is too awkward for users to have to manage. The new headless app paradigm is step 2 of getting to a better scheme. Of course, as others have pointed out, they still haven't gotten that part quite right yet.

[locke7]

This makes me think that the first well done headless app will make bank!!!

Posted via my Q10.