Hasta La Gadget!

Aug 04

IOS Clipboard App Runs in Background by Playing Music

Posted in: Hacks, Mods and DIY, iPhone, Today's Chili

Tapbots has come up with an ingenious workaround to get Pastebot, its excellent iOS clipboard manager, to run in the background. From there it will remember what you copy and add it to a list, or send it off to Macs or other iOS devices on your network. But how?

Apple added some limited multitasking to iOS4, letting apps carry on with certain tasks in the background while you go and do something else. This is great if you want to listen to Spotify, or have Skype wait for incoming calls, or even have your GPS logger track your every move. But for a clipboard application there’s nothing.

To keep Pastebot running, the developers use music. It turns out that, if Pastebot loops a silent MP3 in the background, it can also continue to pull data from the clipboard:

[…] it works flawlessly. You can finally copy from your Mac or on your iPhone without having to open Pastebot after each copy. When you copy from another app, the signature Tapbots copy sound plays to inform you that Pastebot received it.

The catch? Apple didn’t like it:

In the rejection letter, Apple gave us two options:
*Provide audible content to the user while running in the background
*Remove the audio from the background

Tapbots chose number one. The newly submitted version will let you chose a track from your iTunes library and play it on a loop. This can, of course, be a silent track. The app is still awaiting approval, but as Apple’s suggestions have been followed, then all should – hopefully – go well.

This workaround raises some questions, though. Will any app now be able to run in the background using this trick? That could really cause battery life problems if abused. Second, how much is an App allowed to do if it is supposed to be just playing music?

Coming Soon to Pastebot: Music in the Background [Tapbots]

See Also:

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.