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Tombstoning with Windows Phone 7
Posted August 9, 2010
Surprisingly, this post isn’t about zombies, pirates, ninjas or ghosts. Unfortunately, buying a Windows Phone 7 won’t improve your pirate ninja skills, arm you against the undead or help you find ghosts (ed: any developers want to tackle any/all of these? Please?) This post is about how Windows Phone will help you multitask in the most effective way without you even noticing.
What we’re talking about is tombstoning, which is a term being knocked about by the developer team and various Windows Phone 7 developers. Tombstoning is what happens with some 3rd party apps when you change focus. As an example, say you’re playing an awesome game, and all of a sudden you remember that if you don’t reply to that email somebody sent you yesterday you will have your own head served to you on a platter. You don’t want to exit the game and lose your progress, so you hit the start button and open up your email.
If the app is able to tombstone, the app that you were in will effectively pause while you send your email. Then all you need to do is hit back till you’re in the game and HEY PRESTO, you’re back in the game at the point where you left it.
What this means is that because it wasn’t running in the background, the phone isn’t using unnecessary processing power, which means that you’re battery will last that little bit longer and everything will be a bit smoother. However, you won’t have lost where you were just because you needed to avoid certain death or, for another less dramatic example, take a call.
When we heard about this, we were thinking how useful this would be in real life…
Say you’re at work and your boss asks you a question that you probably should know the answer to. Uh oh, things are about to get awkward, but BAM! TOMBSTONE THAT SUCKER! Then you have time to go off, make sure you have the answer and then, when suitably informed, come back and UNTOMBSTONE. Why yes, the capital expenditure of Brazil is similar to that of Madagascar… or something…
Not that that’s ever happened to us…
cc image used courtesy of r8r with thanks.
Comments
POSTED Mon, 09 Aug 2010 15:24:07 +0100
POSTED Mon, 09 Aug 2010 18:34:08 +0100
Is that all? Isn’t that how Palm OS worked a decade ago? Effective and sensible, perhaps. But hardly that novel or exciting.
POSTED Mon, 09 Aug 2010 18:51:58 +0100
What if you want to listen to music via a third party app and perform another task such as answer an email or send an SMS? Is Tombstoning going to essentially pause my music from playback while I perform another task?
POSTED Mon, 09 Aug 2010 19:20:30 +0100
As a former Microsoft employee, I can say with a great deal of certainty that this NEVER happens at Microsoft. The powers that be always make the right decision every time and nobody’s ever caught unaware or unprepared for a direction change.
POSTED Mon, 09 Aug 2010 19:22:24 +0100
And yes, I had wrapped that in Sarcasm tags however it appears that the tag brackets result in a filtering effect. Next time I’ll use curly braces ({}) instead of the less than and greater than brackets.
POSTED Mon, 09 Aug 2010 21:12:16 +0100
I couldn’t help but be reminded of those old Snickers “Need a moment?” commercials.
POSTED Mon, 09 Aug 2010 22:52:08 +0100
Tombstoning the idea is good, however is it fully implemented in the WP7 emulator as it doesnt work with the Bing maps app, nor does it work with apps like calculator as such, however it does work with the mobile IE browser. I was just wondering does it work with the developer phones?
Thanks
POSTED Tue, 10 Aug 2010 06:00:31 +0100
I understand the idea, but really, that is an unfortunate term to be using, the WP7 critics are going to latch onto that and use it as put down for the lack of 3rd party multi-tasking. I do get it that lack of multi-tasking is a good idea from the stand point of battery life.
POSTED Tue, 10 Aug 2010 13:00:44 +0100
POSTED Thu, 12 Aug 2010 11:20:27 +0100
POSTED Thu, 12 Aug 2010 13:01:35 +0100
POSTED Sun, 17 Apr 2011 14:31:50 +0100