Pomodoros In The Background

With the announcement of iPhone OS 4.0, it looks like 3rd party app multitasking will work great for us! I’ve received many, many requests to make the timer work in the background. Right now, it acts like it runs in the background. If you quit and launch again, it continues as if it never stopped. But I couldn’t make the phone ding when time was up, and the ticking sound in the background was out of the question, too.

I’m still playing with the beta of 4.0 to see what I can use. It looks like there are two features I’d like to build. One I’m quite sure of, the other may or may not work.

Apple let’s developers schedule notifications to pop up. That will solve the problem of having the timer ding when time is up, whether or not the app is running.

But, can I still have the timer ticking sound in the background? As demonstrated by Apple, there are hooks in the system that will allow this. But many Pomodoro Timer users like to listen to music while the app is ticking.

Take Joe, one of my beta testers. He likes to listen to music on his phone while running a pomodoro. I don’t know why you’d want the ticking sound, too, since the rhythm differences with the music would drive me nuts. But I digress.

Mixing with the iPod app’s audio is straightforward while the Pomodoro Timer is running. But is it possible while running in the background? Or what if you want to use another background audio app like Pandora? At this point, I’m not sure how these apps will play together.

So, it’s clear that I’ll be able to alert you that a pomodoro is up when the app isn’t in the foreground, but I’ll need to wait until after 4.0 is released to see how the background ticking works out.