Way back when, when everyone was still complaining about Apple’s lack of support for (3rd party) multitasking, there was a simple solution put in place. This solution was known as push notifications.

Push notifications solved many of the issues associated with background processing. For example, when quitting the AIM application, the server could keep you logged in and send you a push notification when a new message arrived. You could then tap on a View button that would launch the app.

This solution is great and all, but it still requires that you have an active internet connection. As of iOS4, Apple has introduced a new type of notification that can be scheduled to fire within the device itself. It requires no complicated server programming, or additional configuration with iTunes. I am talking about Local Notifications.

iOS 4 presented a million billion new API’s by Apple’s count, but for this post I am going to show a quick demo of the new Assets Library API where you can now get to users photos and videos with more access than ever before. This new API relies on the new programming device called Blocks that has been introduced with iOS 4. Blocks are used through many of the new API’s as a kind of extended @selector. We will …