iphone ios running in separate thread

Solution 1:

In my opinion, the best way is with libdispatch, aka Grand Central Dispatch (GCD). It limits you to iOS 4 and greater, but it's just so simple and easy to use. The code to do some processing on a background thread and then do something with the results in the main run loop is incredibly easy and compact:

dispatch_async( dispatch_get_global_queue(DISPATCH_QUEUE_PRIORITY_DEFAULT, 0), ^{
    // Add code here to do background processing
    //
    //
    dispatch_async( dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{
        // Add code here to update the UI/send notifications based on the
        // results of the background processing
    });
});

If you haven't done so already, check out the videos from WWDC 2010 on libdispatch/GCD/blocks.

Solution 2:

The best way for the multithreading in iOS is using GCD (Grand Central Dispatch).

//creates a queue.

dispatch_queue_t myQueue = dispatch_queue_create("unique_queue_name", NULL);

dispatch_async(myQueue, ^{
    //stuffs to do in background thread
    dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{
    //stuffs to do in foreground thread, mostly UI updates
    });
});