Multitasking = cumbersome?

Why delete them?

Theyre not using any system resources whatsoever, and chances are any app you want to "switch" to is close to the top.


I think Apples way of "multitasking" is really confusing people - as folks seem to think apps are open, when they are in fact not.

 

There is no reason to "delete" them.

I think that pretty much solves your problem.

 

yeah, it would be nice to have a "kill all" option. But I take that with some reservations. Task Killer on my Evo had that option and it occasionally reeked havoc on my phone causing it to freeze. I wish there was more of a "priority kill" where apps that haven't been used in a while would shut down.

 

I sort of had the same feelings as the OP. So does this also mean having a huge list of apps "open" isn't draining any extra battery life either? If there really is no downside to having them all open unless you manually delete them, my mind has just changed completely.

 

Actually they are running, how would they not be? When you have a game sitting in your multitask bar and click on it it goes back to the game..

I just asked a question about this and looked up in the manual that deleting the individual apps from the multitask bar does indeed force quit the application.

I find that my battery is getting drained when I have certain apps in that bar for a while.

 

I agree it is very cumbersome and was done really poorly. I would say it is below the blackberry in terms of multitasking and switching between apps. I say that in the since that the blackberry method is pretty poor as well in jumping between apps and not intuitive all either but it can be custimized a bit to make it a little better and you have more control on if you want a close an app from inside of the app instead of on iOS you have to do it the apple way.

Of the phones that I have read that are the best for multitasking to the end user I would say Palm OS is the best. Followed by android, then blackberry then iPhone. I do not know enough about nokia to judge that os.

 

The problem is that on every other smart phone you actually had to manage things. People are so conditioned that now people think they need to do the same.

 

If the phone has Task manager they blew it.

-Steve

 

THey are not "running" at all.

Unless its streaming music, or fetching GPS info, or actively DOING SOMETHING on the background - its not using any resources.

It's not multitasking like people are used to - its totally different.

 

Then just drop out to the springboard and switch to the app that way.

Its actually much simpler than you're making it out to be.

 

Apple makes software and hardware they can't address peoples OCD issues.

 

That's not multitasking. You don't multitask through tens of applications, it's a few, so they are put in the taskbar in a priority queue.

 

Put it this way: don't use the "multi-task bar". There's no reason to. Just keep using the phone the same way you've always been using it. Launch your apps from the main pages. From a user standpoint, the phone works the same. All that's different is that the app may pick up where it left off now where it wouldn't before. Pretend multi-tasking doesn't exist, let the app deal with it.

 

Yeah we do. You're too lazy to close a few apps which with even 15 may take 25 seconds tops.

Don't like multitasking? Go back to 3.3.1 and begone.

You guys are getting annoying.

 

This article does a good job illustrating the iPhone's multitasking feature: iPhone Multitasking. The feature's well-constructed, IMO.

 

What ARE you trying to say? Your most frequently used apps are on your main screen, and the multitasking thing is your most recently used apps - its meant to be used when you're jumping between apps (eg. safari and IM and game or w/e)

 

Just to clarify, expect in a few special cases, Apps are NOT running in the background, draining your battery. Apps that support "Fast App Switching" will freeze their state in memory and stop running. This is much like putting your computer in standby mode, but on the application level.

Also, the iPhone will manage shutting down applications when they haven't been used in a while. What does this mean to you, the user? You never have to worry about which apps are in frozen mode or shutdown. The OS handles that for you. BTW, the double-click app view is pretty much just a list of recently used applications.

So relax and and enjoy the phone...

 

Right.. what you're trying to say is: "whaaaaaaaaaa."

 

Then don't use the multitasking tray. The phone works just fine if you navigate between apps using the old way (going home and selecting an application). You don't ever need to manually close apps in the tray either, it's not like they're using any system resources.

 

Nope. They are in memory but only one app runs at a time. When you switch to another app, the current one stops (even Pandora, since what continues running is the background service Pandora is using, not the app itself) but is kept in memory until you select it again. If iOS needs more memory, it'll "kill" the least recently used app and free the memory, but store the state so the next time you select it, it restarts where it left off. This is where you're being confused by deleting the app force quits it - it's doing what the OS does, removing the app state from memory.

So killing the app from the multitasking tray is a pointless exercise that may even be making things worse (the OS needs to do extra work to save the app state and reload closed apps that aren't in memory)

Even in "true" multitasking, like on a Mac, all processes aren't running all the time. They get swapped into and out of memory by the CPU when it decides by some arcane criteria when a halted process needs to continue. More cores mean more processes can run simultaneously, but even then, you can't have more processes than cores running at the same time. The switching happens so fast it looks like everything's still running.

This is where most complaints about iOS not having "true" mulitasking fail - with a single window UI, there's no point in having multiple apps running. Where the complaints are valid, it's in that Apple provides the background services so you're constrained to those few.