I guess exactly the five people who actually have OS 4.0 running and have seen it working. I'm running OS 4.0, and multitasking is implemented really well. It works flawlessly and is easy to use. You're right, everybody's going about this app closing thing, not realizing that you'll most likely never use this function.
I understand it and have not seen it yet.
That being said, I think it will be much more clear when people get their hands on it.
People are way overthinking it.
For 99% of the time you won't have to do anything different than you do now.
Of those of you who have used it, I assume the fast task switching works if you just run the program normally does it not? So lets say I was in a status check program app I have, and then I leave it to go check mail. I can double tap and click it in the fast-switch location, or if I just click on it in its normal icon location, I am still going to go right back to where I was.
Can anyone confirm that? I always assumed that is the case, which means for 99% of people 99% of the time they are not going to be doing things much differently.
I think the combination of background APIs with fasttask switching is a pretty good combo to deal with what most people want from multi-tasking and it does so in a very resource conservative way. It is very impressive how they have designed it. From what some of you are saying the execution is just as good.
Back on point though, people are overthinking it. You could use your iPhone the same way you do it now. Only now when you leave Pandora it will keep playing music, and when you run a different program you just left it will go right back to where you left it. This is why they said if you see a task manager you did it wrong. The Fast-Switch Launcher is not a task manager. it is simply a way to quickly go back to the most recently saved programs, nothing more or nothing less.
They have this deletion functionality for people who are OCD. There are going to be very few cases in normal use where any of us will ever find ourselves needing to delete applications from the fast task switcher. The system manages itself.
I think people have this idea that they will regularly be going in and deleting stuff from there, and it is simply not going to be the case. You just run new stuff and the old stuff moves down and eventually rolls off. There may be some very specific circumstances or testing reasons to want to remove stuff from there, otherwise it is wholly unnecessary to be deleting apps from the fast task switcher.
I love how Apple said something like "You don't even have to worry about" when someone asked "How do you close applications?" at the end of the iPhone OS 4 keynote! And of course they realised that in fact you do have to close applications after all...
I think closing an app by dragging it out of the multi-tasking stripe would be a bit simpler, the same way you drag apps out of the dock if you want to remove their icon in OS X.
You really don't though. Sure they have added the functionality, but almost nobody will ever use it, and of those who might use it, it is unlikely to be on any regular basis.
There is no reason to do this because you are not "closing" an app by deleting it from there. You are just erasing its saved memory state. There are not many reasons why someone would want to do that, since the OS manages that on its own.
