One of the biggest gripes people have with the iPhone’s third party applications is that none of them can run in the background. The most frustrating genre of applications that this affects however are music applications. Pandora would be so much better on the iPhone if it could run in the background while I’m doing other things on the phone.
Well, at least one developer has come up with a solution to this problem. FlyCast is a free internet radio application with over 1,000 stations to choose from that are easily browsable by genre or by searching. FlyCast has one interesting feature that other audio streaming applications don’t have on the iPhone. FlyCast can not only play it’s audio streams in the application itself but you can also stream those same stations through MobileSafari.
Since MobileSafari is capable of streaming audio in the background you can open up FlyCast, pick a station to listen to, open it in Safari, and go about your business.
The downside of course is that you can’t browse the internet using Safari since it is busy streaming the audio but it is one heck of a large step in the right direction.
