Well I wish it would really worked that way so I can ignore it... but since that thing is making apps crash left and right I have no choice to open that "FAS" and close everthing in it every day.
fwiw, a little while back I had to take my iPhone 4 into the Genius bar because i was having an issue with the button recognising double clicks. As an aside at one point (as the Genius was playing around with the double click) he mentioned that it is a good idea to regularly go into the App Switcher and close down all the Apps in there that you aren't using.
Because this is a particularly fiddly and time-consuming process it really bugged me that i couldn't close down all backgrounded/frozen/running (pick your terminology...) apps at once. I did some digging and found a great Cydia app that allows you to do this.
If you're happy to jailbreak herbapou this might make your life easier. Now i simply hold down my home button for about 1 sec (less than the amount of time it takes to bring up Voice Control) and the iPhone will close down everything in the App Switcher. It also gives me the option to leave user-defined Apps running - eg Safari, Mail, Messages etc...
Super useful IF you feel that backgrounded apps are causing you issues. Of course Apple state that Apps will close down automatically if the system requires their memory to do other stuff, but I found it interesting that an Apple Genius had been trained to tell folks to manually shut down stuff in the App Switcher from time to time...
I think icons make more sense on a small screen. All text apps look exactly the same on an expose view, while their icons look different. On a largeger screen like that of an iPad however this could be more useful then icons because you can read some text whilestill in expose.
I think icons make more sense on a small screen. All text apps look exactly the same on an expose view, while their icons look different. On a largeger screen like that of an iPad however this could be more useful then icons because you can read some text whilestill in expose.
I think icons make more sense on a small screen. All text apps look exactly the same on an expose view, while their icons look different. On a largeger screen like that of an iPad however this could be more useful then icons because you can read some text whilestill in expose.
Excellent point. I couldn't put my finger on what felt wrong about the design, but that's it.
fwiw, a little while back I had to take my iPhone 4 into the Genius bar because i was having an issue with the button recognising double clicks. As an aside at one point (as the Genius was playing around with the double click) he mentioned that it is a good idea to regularly go into the App Switcher and close down all the Apps in there that you aren't using.
Because this is a particularly fiddly and time-consuming process it really bugged me that i couldn't close down all backgrounded/frozen/running (pick your terminology...) apps at once. I did some digging and found a great Cydia app that allows you to do this.
If you're happy to jailbreak herbapou this might make your life easier. Now i simply hold down my home button for about 1 sec (less than the amount of time it takes to bring up Voice Control) and the iPhone will close down everything in the App Switcher. It also gives me the option to leave user-defined Apps running - eg Safari, Mail, Messages etc...
Super useful IF you feel that backgrounded apps are causing you issues. Of course Apple state that Apps will close down automatically if the system requires their memory to do other stuff, but I found it interesting that an Apple Genius had been trained to tell folks to manually shut down stuff in the App Switcher from time to time...
You can close all apps at once by performing a reset by holding the the Home and Power buttons until the iPhone/iPod/iPad restarts. This way everything in the memory is erased and the system restarts. But remember, those apps in the "recent apps" bar will still be there and that mean nothing more than them being recent apps. Being in the "Recent Apps". or whatever you want to call it, doesn't mean that the app is running or doing anything. It is there so you can get access to recent apps without having to leave the current app. For me it is useful in some cases where you are working on two apps copying and pasting text/pictures from one to another.
Much better than the current multi-tasking dock but the mechanism to close apps is messy. Why not just support the WebOS implementation of flicking them off the top of the screen which is much more intuitive. Same can be said of the stackable cards in place of Exposé. Apple should just bite the bullet and copy Palm like RIM did, it is great GUI design.
Disagree. I found the iOS task switcher quite intuitive. I guessed correctly that pressing the (X) from the task list would kill the process. It is highly congruent with the Springboard UI. It is minimalist and clean.
I think they should start using that in Android phone ads. "The multitasking is so "real" it uses 10x the battery life!!1!!11! How cool is that?! I bet your iPhone can't do that ;p*"
*the smiley is sure to make iPhone users feel jealous.
If i leave angry birds (or some other game) sitting i n the background, my battery dissapears far quicker than it usually does. So the iphone must have real multitasking...
Of course I took him to task, but he didn't come back because there is no FAS documentation, I checked. Maybe it is one of those urban legends.
I believe he was referring to FAS (fast app switching) as an action not the feature. I personally couldn't find anything about that app dock (I like to call it recent app dock). But from my experience it is basically a recent apps list/dock. An app being on that list doesn't necessarily mean that it support any of the seven background features (audio, VOIP, location, Push Notification, Local Notification, Task Finishing, Fast App Switching). However, closing an app from the recent app list will cause the app to terminal and in few cases the background action to ends. The only background action that stay active even after the app is terminated are VOIP, PN, and LN.
Of course I took him to task, but he didn't come back because there is no FAS documentation, I checked. Maybe it is one of those urban legends.
There is very little because it?s nothing but a list of recently used apps. On the other hand there is plenty of multitasking in iOS because that takes effort from a developer. The only documentation you will find is that an app will not show up in FAS until you compile it for iOS 4.0. It was listed a feature that shows your recent app items. There is nothing more to it and nothing for devs to do so there is no needed documentation.
You are expecting me to prove a negative; that unless there is documentation from Apple that states something that would never be stated then you are somehow correct. You posed erroneous argument. You lost.
There is very little because it?s nothing but a list of recently used apps. On the other hand there is plenty of multitasking in iOS because that takes effort from a developer. The only documentation you will find is that an app will not show up in FAS until you compile it for iOS 4.0. It was listed a feature that shows your recent app items. There is nothing more to it and nothing for devs to do so there is no needed documentation.
You are expecting me to prove a negative; that unless there is documentation from Apple that states something that would never be stated then you are somehow correct. You posed erroneous argument. You lost.
I don't disagree with your analysis, only your arrogance. I think that the current functionality might be improved by erasing all of the suspended app icons from the tray after a reboot but by no means does your assertion that all app icons in the tray are completely dead, inactive, history, etc, that makes no sense according to the official Apple documentation. And BTW closing with 'you lost' is a total concession on your part.
I don't disagree with your analysis, only your arrogance. I think that the current functionality might be improved by erasing all of the suspended app icons from the tray after a reboot but by no means does your assertion that all app icons in the tray are completely dead, inactive, history, etc, that makes no sense according to the official Apple documentation. And BTW closing with 'you lost' is a total concession on your part.
Why don?t you show me the documentation that shows that all apps in FAS are running in RAM and that they are all restarted when you restart your device. Can you find me any documentation at all that references RAM and suspend states with FAS?
OMG! How on earth can you run left and right apps, while your middle app causes them to crash? I would say wake up young fellow it's just a bad dream. What you describe is pretty much impossible to happen, at least for non jailbroken iPhones. (If it may happen to jailbroken iPhones, I simply don't know).
\
"left and right" was a figure of speech (obviousy a bad one) for saying I had apps crashing on a regular basis if I dont clean the FAS. My ipad/iphone are not jailbreak btw and it pretty clear the crash are caused by all the apps in the FAS because if I remove them the apps stop crashing. The apps that crash when the FAS is crowded are Dungeon defenders, New york Times, Popular Science, The elements, TouTV. The FAS is not supposed to cause this, but it does. Maybe I have an bad app that corrupts something in the OS memory sectors.
And dont say its impossible, there is no such a thing as an 100% protected OS. At work we have to reboot our IBM mainframe once a week even if they are not "suppose" to have memory corruption. ANY computer needs a reboot from time to time no matter how much the OS is suppose to be protected from memory leaks or corruption of the OS memory sectors.
Why don’t you show me the documentation that shows that all apps in FAS are running in RAM and that they are all restarted when you restart your device. Can you find me any documentation at all that references RAM and suspend states with FAS?
I did but you apparently didn't read it so I have copied and pasted from my ealier post #86
To preserve battery life, most applications are suspended by the system shortly after entering the background. A suspended application remains in memory but does not execute any code. This behavior allows an application to resume quickly when it is relaunched without consuming battery power in the meantime. However, applications may be allowed to continue running in the background for the following reasons....
I did but you apparently didn't read it so I have copied and pasted from my ealier post #86
To preserve battery life, most applications are suspended by the system shortly after entering the background. A suspended application remains in memory but does not execute any code. This behavior allows an application to resume quickly when it is relaunched without consuming battery power in the meantime. However, applications may be allowed to continue running in the background for the following reasons....
Why do you think that has any barring on the apps listed in FAS? Where is your proof that any and all apps listed in FAS are using RAM?
Again, what you quoted is what one would expect. What isn't stated is a damn thing about what the icons in FAS represent yet you keep insisting I'm wrong about apps in FAS mean they are all in RAM, even after a restart.
Why do you think that has any barring on the apps listed in FAS? Where is your proof that any and all apps listed in FAS are using RAM?
Again, what you quoted is what one would expect. What isn't stated is a damn thing about what the icons in FAS represent yet you keep insisting I'm wrong about apps in FAS mean they are all in RAM, even after a restart.
Not really sure why you do this Solip. Seems like you deliberately just try to be difficult sometimes?
It is actually really clear that "backgrounded" apps are simply those that have been opened, then "sent to the background" by the user returning to the home screen. All backgrounded apps are then displayed in the App Switcher (which might more accurately be called the "Background Bar")
Per mstone's quote, MOST backgrounded apps are suspended shortly after being sent to the background bar. In this suspended state they remain in memory, but don't execute any code - this allows them to quickly resume from the same state rather than having to restart. Not all apps are suspended though - SOME, which we might call "true multitasking apps" take advantage of certain APIs that allow them to continue to execute code whilst backgrounded, eg iPod app, Pandora etc.
The background bar serves several purposes then. Firstly, it allows you to quickly switch between recently used apps (with their current state preserved), secondly it gives the user more control over "true multitasking apps" by allowing him/her to elect to manually close them down/kill any background processes if so desired. Theoretically this shouldn't be necessary in that Apple have stated that apps will be automatically killed if the phone starts to run out of memory, however as mentioned previously, I've had an Apple Genius tell me that it's good practice to manually kill apps from time to time.
(As an aside, the cydia app "Remove Background" is useful for doing this in that it removes all apps from the background bar AND kills all app processes too - the equivalent of jiggling/killing each individual app one by one.)
I think where people seem to get confused by the Background Bar is that it does several different things, whilst failing to really differentiate between them. It combines: "system apps" (which traditionally would always be open, and shouldn't really need to ever be closed eg phone, messages, iPod, Safari etc), PLUS a list of backgrounded recently opened apps which are in a suspended state, PLUS apps that are running background processes. I guess the reason they don't differentiate between these three different groups is to keep things as simple as possible for the user, but the downside is that for some people (Solip?) it actually seems to lead to confusion. Personally I would like to see some sort of visual differentiation between apps that are actually running background processes and those that aren't (with perhaps even the ability to see how much memory each app is using... however this is obviously extremely un-iOS-ey)
It's unbelieavable that you think FAS list all apps using RAM. Speaking of difficult, how hard it is to check your resources to know these apps are all running in FAS. I have just under 50 in mine which correspond to te exact number of apps located on my Home Screen.
What's with calling it a background bar? Are people so unclea on how to use their iPhone they don't know they can reaccess suspended apps from anywhere in the system, not just FAS? This is a simple concept people!
Why is this concept so hard for some people? Do you think 512MB RAM is really enough for all your apps and OS to run constantly? Where does that mental disconnect come from.
This is like explaining to people the sun doesn’t go around the Earth and having them tell you know because they can see it with their own eyes. Just because FAS is a bar that sits in the “background" until you double-tap the Home Button does not mean that all those apps in FAS are running in the background. It’s a list! Plain and simple. I’ve shown plenty tests you can do to test this. There are also paid apps you can get to see the RAM usage after you power cycle your device to see that every app you’ve ever opened is not loaded in RAM simply because it’s in the FAS recent apps list.
From Apple: "a suspended app remain in memory". Not much memory is used presumably, but some. That's the difference between a backgrounded app and an app that is physically closed down.
And of course you can access bacgrounded apps from anywhere? Clicking the app icon on your home screen will access the backgrounded app just the same as accessing it from the background bar would.
No, 512MB of RAM is not enough to run everything constantly, that's why Apple says that:
- if the system starts to run out of memory some backgrounded apps will be closed down
- from time to time it's good practice to physically close down apps
And I'm fine with Copernicus' explanation for the movement of celestial bodies. He was more convincing than you are :-)
Comments
Well I wish it would really worked that way so I can ignore it... but since that thing is making apps crash left and right I have no choice to open that "FAS" and close everthing in it every day.
fwiw, a little while back I had to take my iPhone 4 into the Genius bar because i was having an issue with the button recognising double clicks. As an aside at one point (as the Genius was playing around with the double click) he mentioned that it is a good idea to regularly go into the App Switcher and close down all the Apps in there that you aren't using.
Because this is a particularly fiddly and time-consuming process it really bugged me that i couldn't close down all backgrounded/frozen/running (pick your terminology...) apps at once. I did some digging and found a great Cydia app that allows you to do this.
If you're happy to jailbreak herbapou this might make your life easier. Now i simply hold down my home button for about 1 sec (less than the amount of time it takes to bring up Voice Control) and the iPhone will close down everything in the App Switcher. It also gives me the option to leave user-defined Apps running - eg Safari, Mail, Messages etc...
Super useful IF you feel that backgrounded apps are causing you issues. Of course Apple state that Apps will close down automatically if the system requires their memory to do other stuff, but I found it interesting that an Apple Genius had been trained to tell folks to manually shut down stuff in the App Switcher from time to time...
I think icons make more sense on a small screen. All text apps look exactly the same on an expose view, while their icons look different. On a largeger screen like that of an iPad however this could be more useful then icons because you can read some text whilestill in expose.
Exactly.
I think icons make more sense on a small screen. All text apps look exactly the same on an expose view, while their icons look different. On a largeger screen like that of an iPad however this could be more useful then icons because you can read some text whilestill in expose.
Excellent point. I couldn't put my finger on what felt wrong about the design, but that's it.
fwiw, a little while back I had to take my iPhone 4 into the Genius bar because i was having an issue with the button recognising double clicks. As an aside at one point (as the Genius was playing around with the double click) he mentioned that it is a good idea to regularly go into the App Switcher and close down all the Apps in there that you aren't using.
Because this is a particularly fiddly and time-consuming process it really bugged me that i couldn't close down all backgrounded/frozen/running (pick your terminology...) apps at once. I did some digging and found a great Cydia app that allows you to do this.
If you're happy to jailbreak herbapou this might make your life easier. Now i simply hold down my home button for about 1 sec (less than the amount of time it takes to bring up Voice Control) and the iPhone will close down everything in the App Switcher. It also gives me the option to leave user-defined Apps running - eg Safari, Mail, Messages etc...
Super useful IF you feel that backgrounded apps are causing you issues. Of course Apple state that Apps will close down automatically if the system requires their memory to do other stuff, but I found it interesting that an Apple Genius had been trained to tell folks to manually shut down stuff in the App Switcher from time to time...
You can close all apps at once by performing a reset by holding the the Home and Power buttons until the iPhone/iPod/iPad restarts. This way everything in the memory is erased and the system restarts. But remember, those apps in the "recent apps" bar will still be there and that mean nothing more than them being recent apps. Being in the "Recent Apps". or whatever you want to call it, doesn't mean that the app is running or doing anything. It is there so you can get access to recent apps without having to leave the current app. For me it is useful in some cases where you are working on two apps copying and pasting text/pictures from one to another.
Much better than the current multi-tasking dock but the mechanism to close apps is messy. Why not just support the WebOS implementation of flicking them off the top of the screen which is much more intuitive. Same can be said of the stackable cards in place of Exposé. Apple should just bite the bullet and copy Palm like RIM did, it is great GUI design.
Disagree. I found the iOS task switcher quite intuitive. I guessed correctly that pressing the (X) from the task list would kill the process. It is highly congruent with the Springboard UI. It is minimalist and clean.
Out of everyone here, you chose the right man to ask and put to the task.
Of course I took him to task, but he didn't come back because there is no FAS documentation, I checked. Maybe it is one of those urban legends.
I think they should start using that in Android phone ads. "The multitasking is so "real" it uses 10x the battery life!!1!!11! How cool is that?! I bet your iPhone can't do that ;p*"
*the smiley is sure to make iPhone users feel jealous.
If i leave angry birds (or some other game) sitting i n the background, my battery dissapears far quicker than it usually does. So the iphone must have real multitasking...
Of course I took him to task, but he didn't come back because there is no FAS documentation, I checked. Maybe it is one of those urban legends.
I believe he was referring to FAS (fast app switching) as an action not the feature. I personally couldn't find anything about that app dock (I like to call it recent app dock). But from my experience it is basically a recent apps list/dock. An app being on that list doesn't necessarily mean that it support any of the seven background features (audio, VOIP, location, Push Notification, Local Notification, Task Finishing, Fast App Switching). However, closing an app from the recent app list will cause the app to terminal and in few cases the background action to ends. The only background action that stay active even after the app is terminated are VOIP, PN, and LN.
Of course I took him to task, but he didn't come back because there is no FAS documentation, I checked. Maybe it is one of those urban legends.
There is very little because it?s nothing but a list of recently used apps. On the other hand there is plenty of multitasking in iOS because that takes effort from a developer. The only documentation you will find is that an app will not show up in FAS until you compile it for iOS 4.0. It was listed a feature that shows your recent app items. There is nothing more to it and nothing for devs to do so there is no needed documentation.
You are expecting me to prove a negative; that unless there is documentation from Apple that states something that would never be stated then you are somehow correct. You posed erroneous argument. You lost.
There is very little because it?s nothing but a list of recently used apps. On the other hand there is plenty of multitasking in iOS because that takes effort from a developer. The only documentation you will find is that an app will not show up in FAS until you compile it for iOS 4.0. It was listed a feature that shows your recent app items. There is nothing more to it and nothing for devs to do so there is no needed documentation.
You are expecting me to prove a negative; that unless there is documentation from Apple that states something that would never be stated then you are somehow correct. You posed erroneous argument. You lost.
I don't disagree with your analysis, only your arrogance. I think that the current functionality might be improved by erasing all of the suspended app icons from the tray after a reboot but by no means does your assertion that all app icons in the tray are completely dead, inactive, history, etc, that makes no sense according to the official Apple documentation. And BTW closing with 'you lost' is a total concession on your part.
screen.
I don't disagree with your analysis, only your arrogance. I think that the current functionality might be improved by erasing all of the suspended app icons from the tray after a reboot but by no means does your assertion that all app icons in the tray are completely dead, inactive, history, etc, that makes no sense according to the official Apple documentation. And BTW closing with 'you lost' is a total concession on your part.
Why don?t you show me the documentation that shows that all apps in FAS are running in RAM and that they are all restarted when you restart your device. Can you find me any documentation at all that references RAM and suspend states with FAS?
OMG! How on earth can you run left and right apps, while your middle app causes them to crash? I would say wake up young fellow it's just a bad dream. What you describe is pretty much impossible to happen, at least for non jailbroken iPhones. (If it may happen to jailbroken iPhones, I simply don't know).
"left and right" was a figure of speech (obviousy a bad one) for saying I had apps crashing on a regular basis if I dont clean the FAS. My ipad/iphone are not jailbreak btw and it pretty clear the crash are caused by all the apps in the FAS because if I remove them the apps stop crashing. The apps that crash when the FAS is crowded are Dungeon defenders, New york Times, Popular Science, The elements, TouTV. The FAS is not supposed to cause this, but it does. Maybe I have an bad app that corrupts something in the OS memory sectors.
And dont say its impossible, there is no such a thing as an 100% protected OS. At work we have to reboot our IBM mainframe once a week even if they are not "suppose" to have memory corruption. ANY computer needs a reboot from time to time no matter how much the OS is suppose to be protected from memory leaks or corruption of the OS memory sectors.
Why don’t you show me the documentation that shows that all apps in FAS are running in RAM and that they are all restarted when you restart your device. Can you find me any documentation at all that references RAM and suspend states with FAS?
I did but you apparently didn't read it so I have copied and pasted from my ealier post #86
To preserve battery life, most applications are suspended by the system shortly after entering the background. A suspended application remains in memory but does not execute any code. This behavior allows an application to resume quickly when it is relaunched without consuming battery power in the meantime. However, applications may be allowed to continue running in the background for the following reasons....
I did but you apparently didn't read it so I have copied and pasted from my ealier post #86
To preserve battery life, most applications are suspended by the system shortly after entering the background. A suspended application remains in memory but does not execute any code. This behavior allows an application to resume quickly when it is relaunched without consuming battery power in the meantime. However, applications may be allowed to continue running in the background for the following reasons....
Why do you think that has any barring on the apps listed in FAS? Where is your proof that any and all apps listed in FAS are using RAM?
Again, what you quoted is what one would expect. What isn't stated is a damn thing about what the icons in FAS represent yet you keep insisting I'm wrong about apps in FAS mean they are all in RAM, even after a restart.
Why do you think that has any barring on the apps listed in FAS? Where is your proof that any and all apps listed in FAS are using RAM?
Again, what you quoted is what one would expect. What isn't stated is a damn thing about what the icons in FAS represent yet you keep insisting I'm wrong about apps in FAS mean they are all in RAM, even after a restart.
Not really sure why you do this Solip. Seems like you deliberately just try to be difficult sometimes?
It is actually really clear that "backgrounded" apps are simply those that have been opened, then "sent to the background" by the user returning to the home screen. All backgrounded apps are then displayed in the App Switcher (which might more accurately be called the "Background Bar")
Per mstone's quote, MOST backgrounded apps are suspended shortly after being sent to the background bar. In this suspended state they remain in memory, but don't execute any code - this allows them to quickly resume from the same state rather than having to restart. Not all apps are suspended though - SOME, which we might call "true multitasking apps" take advantage of certain APIs that allow them to continue to execute code whilst backgrounded, eg iPod app, Pandora etc.
The background bar serves several purposes then. Firstly, it allows you to quickly switch between recently used apps (with their current state preserved), secondly it gives the user more control over "true multitasking apps" by allowing him/her to elect to manually close them down/kill any background processes if so desired. Theoretically this shouldn't be necessary in that Apple have stated that apps will be automatically killed if the phone starts to run out of memory, however as mentioned previously, I've had an Apple Genius tell me that it's good practice to manually kill apps from time to time.
(As an aside, the cydia app "Remove Background" is useful for doing this in that it removes all apps from the background bar AND kills all app processes too - the equivalent of jiggling/killing each individual app one by one.)
I think where people seem to get confused by the Background Bar is that it does several different things, whilst failing to really differentiate between them. It combines: "system apps" (which traditionally would always be open, and shouldn't really need to ever be closed eg phone, messages, iPod, Safari etc), PLUS a list of backgrounded recently opened apps which are in a suspended state, PLUS apps that are running background processes. I guess the reason they don't differentiate between these three different groups is to keep things as simple as possible for the user, but the downside is that for some people (Solip?) it actually seems to lead to confusion. Personally I would like to see some sort of visual differentiation between apps that are actually running background processes and those that aren't (with perhaps even the ability to see how much memory each app is using... however this is obviously extremely un-iOS-ey)
What's with calling it a background bar? Are people so unclea on how to use their iPhone they don't know they can reaccess suspended apps from anywhere in the system, not just FAS? This is a simple concept people!
Why is this concept so hard for some people? Do you think 512MB RAM is really enough for all your apps and OS to run constantly? Where does that mental disconnect come from.
This is like explaining to people the sun doesn’t go around the Earth and having them tell you know because they can see it with their own eyes. Just because FAS is a bar that sits in the “background" until you double-tap the Home Button does not mean that all those apps in FAS are running in the background. It’s a list! Plain and simple. I’ve shown plenty tests you can do to test this. There are also paid apps you can get to see the RAM usage after you power cycle your device to see that every app you’ve ever opened is not loaded in RAM simply because it’s in the FAS recent apps list.
From Apple: "a suspended app remain in memory". Not much memory is used presumably, but some. That's the difference between a backgrounded app and an app that is physically closed down.
And of course you can access bacgrounded apps from anywhere? Clicking the app icon on your home screen will access the backgrounded app just the same as accessing it from the background bar would.
No, 512MB of RAM is not enough to run everything constantly, that's why Apple says that:
- if the system starts to run out of memory some backgrounded apps will be closed down
- from time to time it's good practice to physically close down apps
And I'm fine with Copernicus' explanation for the movement of celestial bodies. He was more convincing than you are :-)