Gestures + Home Button

[kvizzel]

I wish there was an option to allow gestures or the home button to fully close the app, while the other would put it into multitasking mode.

How awesome would that be.

I've had gestures for only a few hours, but it feels so natural and easy.

 

[cinca]

I agree on the gestures feeling natural. There is a bit of an effort required just to remember to swipe up for the app tray and do the pinch to jump to the home screen... But when I DO remember it feels much more natural and organic than the clicking and double clicking of the home button -- which feels pretty archaic compared the the gestures... Like hand-cranking a Ferrari to get it started..

As for repurposing the home button to quit an app -- I suspect they will aways retain a home button and keep it for it's current (albeit, with gestures enabled, redundant) purpose... Not only is it helpful for some of the hard resets and button pressures required when perhaps your screen doesn't work but thee are also just too many people with iPhones not and in rob ably the next few versions who have been trained go use it. Additionally, I haven't really noticed a need to manually quit apps so assigning such a prominent button to such an infrequent need seems a little overkill..

Have you run into a lot of issues that require you to force quit applications..?

 

[kvizzel]

I've never had to hard reset my iPad yet.

What I meant was for example,

You can use gestures to close the app, and the app will end up in the multitasking bar.

While if you close it with the home button, the app will fully close, and not end up in the multitasking bar.

Or vice versa, I think there should be a simple way to close an app without it going into the multitasking bar.

 

[psonice]

Using the home button to quit would be great for a few people (me included 😉) but really confusing for the vast majority.

Besides, the whole point is that you don't need to quit an app, it's handled automatically. The only major exceptions I've come across are when an app crashes in a way that leaves it running but broken (rare) and GPS apps that stay running in the background.

For rare cases like these, you don't want to use the main button on the device. You could surely use it for something more common + useful.

How about this: many apps have a 'home screen' that you often want to return to. Press home button, return to home within the app (and this would ONLY be enabled if you turn on gestures). I say this because I see my wife trying to do it all the time and then swearing when the app gets closed 😉