OS 4.0 Multitasking question

Blues003

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Hey there!

I was thinking a bit about the way MTasking was implemented, and I saw a huge flaw. There is no way to quickly close apps.

Long-home-click brings up voice control. Short-home-click freezes the app and takes it to the background. Double-clicking brings up the dock with background-running apps. So in now way is it possible to quickly truly close an app.

Does that mean that, by the end of the day, I will have to open the dock with the background apps, and hold-and-press-minus for every single app that I do not want running on the iPhone's background? Does that mean that opening the dock, holding an app's icon, and pressing -, is the ONLY way of truly closing an app?
 

ifarlow

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A huge flaw? Really?

You don't need to close anything, but it you want to (for whatever strange reason), then yes, you need to open the list of "running" applications and click the minus on each one you want to end. Bear in mind, though, the big thing everyone seems to be missing: the applications aren't really running in the background. Only specific services required by the applications are running (that are likely already running anyway by the system), so the hit on your processor, memory, and battery is going to be low.

That is the whole point behind Apple's method for background applications: low system impact. So there's no need to care about what is "running" in the background.
 

Blues003

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The hit on processor, battery, whatever, is low. I know that.

But it is still a hit. I'd rather have the option of fully closing an app if I so desire.
 

Jellotime91

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The hit on processor, battery, whatever, is low. I know that.

But it is still a hit. I'd rather have the option of fully closing an app if I so desire.

You have the option, it's just not as simple as before. Apple wants to create an interface where things don't just close when you hit the home button. Sometimes you accidentally click the home button while you're uploading a video.. Whoops! Now you have to start over. Apple wants to create a Blackberry OS seemless multitasking UI but with quicker access to apps and quicker ability to close them, also with much less impact on battery and processor / ram power.

They've developed a great solution to multitask. At the risk of being a fanboy I truly believe it's the best system anyone has implemented yet for multitasking. You will be very satisfied with it when you use it, I promise.
 

Blues003

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I will ignore the hit on processor, battery, memory, whatever. It is minor, not non-existant, but for the sake of the discussion, I shall consider it 0.

Yet, consider the following situation: You're on your Safari browser, and you want to continue playing a game you were playing before. You double-click Home, just like Steve Jobs did. After all, it's much easier to do that, then to scroll through pages of apps, right? Thing is, you end up finding out that you also have to scroll through docks of apps, because in between your goal-game, there are several apps that really are of no interest for you to be running in the background (camera, calculator, photos), but that are just there. Why? Because there was no option to directly close them, and you really wouldn't be bothered to hold-and-press-minus on every single one of them. So I can see this as being not-as-user-friendly-as-it-should. Or at least, not "that simple", to quote Apple's CEO.
 

Jellotime91

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I will ignore the hit on processor, battery, memory, whatever. It is minor, not non-existant, but for the sake of the discussion, I shall consider it 0.

Yet, consider the following situation: You're on your Safari browser, and you want to continue playing a game you were playing before. You double-click Home, just like Steve Jobs did. After all, it's much easier to do that, then to scroll through pages of apps, right? Thing is, you end up finding out that you also have to scroll through docks of apps, because in between your goal-game, there are several apps that really are of no interest for you to be running in the background (camera, calculator, photos), but that are just there. Why? Because there was no option to directly close them, and you really wouldn't be bothered to hold-and-press-minus on every single one of them. So I can see this as being not-as-user-friendly-as-it-should. Or at least, not "that simple", to quote Apple's CEO.

I totally understand what you mean and as someone who is incredibly OCD with my iPhone and app arrangement, theming, backgrounds etc... I know this would be a gripe with me as well. I have a feeling Apple will add some new elements that will make it easier to close more apps at once. I have no doubt that they will implement holding your finger down on one and then the close icon appearing on all instead of just that one. The way it is now, it's quite inconsistent. Apple isn't a stranger to changing elements of UI before release.

I think they will develop a fix to this before the problem exists, if not then eventually.
 

Jellotime91

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*sighs* I hope you're right.

Me too! Otherwise there is always the jailbreak community, and we are even getting untethered jailbreaks lately... So you never know how convenient the next jailbreak will be, and with the new (A4?) CPU and likely more ram, it will leave less of a footprint on your device while giving you more fine-grained control of the OS.
 

PhxBlue

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Its Beta 1. You absolutely cannot hang your hat on what you see in beta 1. Be happy for the multitask implementation and wait for the final release.
 

JustinHorn

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Couple things...

1) You have not been able to close apps by holding the home button since voice control was introduced, this is nothing new. What you have to do to "force quit" an app is hold down the power button until it's shows you the slide to shut off page. Then you hold the home button down for like 5 seconds and it will quit the app. You can also do the same thing by removing items from the fast app switch dock.

2) The fast app switch dock always sorts it in most recently used order. So you are in Tap Tap Revenge and go to the home screen to fire up safari. Then you double tap the home button, the first app in the fast app dock is going to be the last app you used, which is Tap Tap. So there is no need to swipe through pages and pages of the "running" apps. If you want to open an app you haven't used in a while, it may actually be quicker to return to the home screen and find it the old way, but in most cases the fast task switcher will be faster.