

Coming Soon to Pastebot: Music in the Background - stilist
http://tapbots.com/blog/pastebot/pastebot-music-in-background

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mortenjorck
I'm a happy Pastebot customer and use it all the time, but I don't think I'll
be using this feature. It's ingenious, but it just feels like the kind of hack
I associate with less UX-focused platforms.

I'm actually kind of glad the silent version wasn't approved, though. As
logically strange as having to play music while using clipboard sync is,
having another music app interrupt that sync is almost worse.

I'd rather Tapbots had gone the Task Completion API route, where they can run
whatever they want in the background for ten minutes (what the Colloquy IRC
client uses). That kind of functionality has an intuitive, physical analog in
timed light switches; one can't say as much for a light switch that requires
the stereo to be playing.

Apple really needs to increase that time limit, though.

~~~
Skroob
Task completion is unreliable for background processes. It's meant for
finishing something quickly before an app goes into an inactive state. The OS
is likely to kill the app at any time if it's taking too long or other apps
need the resources.

Unfortunately there just isn't a nice way for Pastebot to do what they want to
do. It's one of those edge cases where none of the available options for
multitasking are useful. They're doing the best they can, but this is still a
really hacky solution and I wouldn't depend on it staying in the App Store.

~~~
ugh
I think Apple doesn’t have to be quite as restrictive. They could allow
developers to do some general purpose multitasking and take steps limit its
use.

They might only allow general purpose multitasking if it’s off by default and
the user has to explicitly opt-in. They might add something in their settings
app where you can turn turn general purpose multitasking on and off for each
individual app which uses it. They might reject all apps which use general
purpose multitasking when the dedicated methods would do, too. They might
reject all apps which use general purpose multitasking without providing any
functionality to the user. They might require all apps which use this general
purpose multitasking to have some gracious failure mode if memory really gets
low and the app has to be quit. (I’m not so sure about this last one. You
would have to notify the user because otherwise the experience would be
terrible, i.e. suddenly and without any apparent reason or warning Pastebot
would stop to work. But adding a modal dialog would also lead to a terrible
experience, they would have to make it more subtle which in turn can be easily
overlooked. How does Android handle this?)

~~~
Skroob
There's a lot of ways they could go, definitely. But they're trying to keep it
as simple as they can, from the user's perspective anyway. The best feature of
the three multitasking styles they allow is that I don't have to think about
it, which can't be said about the Pastebot solution, nor really any of your
options either.

~~~
drivebyacct2
"From the user perspective"

You don't really believe that do you? You can't honestly tell me that it's
easier to explain to a user that they have to play a silent audio clip to have
an application keep working when it's not visible. And you can't tell me that
for <any multitasking app>, it's easier for the user to use because it can
only work in the background if its a short potentially volatile task, a
location or audio service. How is that 'easier' for the user?

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Synaesthesia
So just to get this straight. You have to have music playing from Pastebot in
the background for it to remain active? (even if it's a silent song) If you
stop the music, does iOS freeze the app?

Well luckily the iPhone has a very long audio playback on it's battery I
guess!

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drivebyacct2
It's not a feature, it's a workaround for a limited multitasking model.

~~~
mustpax
On top of that, it's liable to be rejected by Apple as an abuse of public
APIs.

Just last week there was an article on HN about a guy who got rejected for
using the VoIP background API for an IRC app. Which actually is bending the
rules a lot less than playing a silent audio file on loop in order to claim to
be an audio client.

~~~
hboon
They were already rejected for playing a silent audio file. But this post
mentions they have re-submitted the app, allowing users to play their own
audio files. So this is 100% legitimate.

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jrockway
Release for Android instead? The iPhone is dying.

~~~
code_duck
Ha! I'm no iPhone fanboy but increased competition->(slower growth,market
share)!=dying. They just sold like 18,000,000,000 of these things in a month,
did they not?

