User

14.12.2007 10:03:34

I am very impressed with RB on my iPod Touch; my only gripe is that the iPod's screen stays brightly lit even when I haven't used RB for however long. This seems overkill, when watching a movie for example. It discharges the battery of the iPod, and -I imagine- wears out the screen, too. It would be great if the RB would follow the iPod's general behaviour, which is to go to sleep after a period on non-use.

Or am I missing a trick? 

User

14.12.2007 10:44:16

Thanks for the feedback, but if you are experiencing any such issue, 
it is an issue of Mobile Safari. The AJAX Remote is not a hack or 
native application, it's just a website (a very complex and dynamic 
one, but yet still "just" CSS, HTML and JavaScript) and as such has no 
system API access and thus no influence on when or whether your device 
goes to sleep or not.

Best regards, 
Felix 

User

14.12.2007 12:54:41

Hi Felix,

Many thanks for the prompt response; I understand the principle of what you are saying, yet, the fact remains that the iPod goes to sleep on a 'normal' webpage, and not on the remote control page of RB. Could it be that there is some 'auto-reload' aspect of RB that keeps the iPod active?

I will some more tests and would also be interested to hear other people's experience regarding this. 

User

14.12.2007 13:56:15

Of course the AJAX Remote needs to poll (load) information 
dynamically. Otherwise, it would not be possible to update the 
information on the display in near-realtime. Remote Buddy does this in 
a very efficient way on both the touch device and your Mac to save 
energy and resources.

Pushing data to a web application is not possible (iframes would be a 
way to do this, but to the best of my knowledge iframes are expanded 
by Mobile Safari, making them pretty useless for this purpose).

Best regards, 
Felix 

User

14.12.2007 14:49:46

 
 
Hi Felix,

So is it possible that it is this process that keeps the iPod awake, even when RB isn't being actively used at the time?

Many thanks. 

User

15.12.2007 14:07:02

I don't know, if any activity in Mobile Safari can or can't postpone 
the "auto lock" feature of the iPod Touch.

As a matter of fact, the only possible way to implement the 
functionality of the AJAX Remote in a web application is the way it is 
implemented right now.

A past experiment did show, that Safari will stop any timers (and thus 
new polls for information)

- when you switch to another page

- when you switch to another application

- when you manually lock/sleep the device using the respective 
hardware button

and then resumes them when you view that particular page again. Which 
works perfectly. So if Apple decided that when there's any network 
connection - no matter how short lived it is - Mobile Safari will not 
allow the device to go to sleep, I'm afraid I can't do anything about 
it. You can always file a bugreport with Apple though, which is the 
official way to request changes/fixes/improvements:

http://bugreporter.apple.com/

Best regards, 
Felix