Category: Geeks r Us
Ok, just for fun, maybe this doesn’t apply to you:
For us Windows developer geeks, what do we do when the iPod or whatever, has an issue with an app? Well, close apps of course. That and reboot. Just like the old Winblows phone or WM device.
I, for one, got a rather odd response from a long-time Apple user when she found one of the first things I learned how to do was use the app switcher and close down nonessential programs to save memory. I don't have an excuse, as I used to be a Unix sys admin / I oughta know the kernels are like night and day from each other. Old habits die hard, though, and the Winblows habit of killing off nonessential processes, checking system resources, etc. is just hard to beat. That's why some of us, several friends of mine and i, have informally and rather loosely / independently / true to SW Dev fashion, started what could be thought of as App Switcher AA.
We know the device and the push notifies actually benefit from keeping the apps open, but if there's a problem, the first thing we want to do is shut down the app and restart it.
So the challenge is just to use the app switcher for switching apps, not to kill them off. I haven't kept Papa Sangre in there, not yet anyhow.
I know one guy whose got upwards of 40 apps open.
For you longtime Apple fanchildren or just Apple users, don't you dare laugh, or I'm comin' over there with a stick!
So … care to join? Unless you’re not one of those whose first reaction to sluggishness is to close apps / restart the device. To join the App Switcher AA, all you have to do is not use your App Switcher for anything except … switching apps, or the portrait lock / music controller etc. But just don’t close any apps down. And don’t reboot.
I kinda fell off the wagon so am back to square one I guess.
It was my router's fault: the antenna's starting to die, but I thought my apps were at fault for being sluggish. After all, were it Winblows, they sure as hell would be sluggish when connecting to the net! I pinged by device and found I was losing packets left and right, plus the daughter has a snow day and horror of all horrors, the Internet TV from the wireless laptop wasn't working too well. Yunno the teenage priorities and that. But rather than blame the $29 cheap-ass router I'd bought I was closing apps, even restarted, as though that would actually help. Getting a new routher that's a different issue, but if you're coming over to iOS, and you've spent any time admin-ing or developing on Winblows you know precisely what I'm talking about.
So if you're in the same boat, join up and we'll see how far this goes.
App Switcher AA
from my own personal view, close apps you're not using that you know aren't active. good example there is do you need say a game app open all the time, or just one of the audio toys? stuff like FB, mail, messages... i'd leave open, and will leave open but others i plan to close when finished
Maybe i'm crazy, but I close apps as soon as I know I'm not going to use them. My iPod is better at multi tasking than I am.
Well I always shut down radio apps or Youtube or any other audio app. But now I've gotten to the point of leaving Facely HD - the Facebook app open, as well as Twitterific, Mail, Safari and a couple others. I used to close everything as soon as I was done with it, but leaving these open has not had an adverse effect on the device at all I did, last night, shut down GroupMail after sending out a Coast Guard Staff list email but still, maybe I was being overboard, but for some of us, learning to not just kill all apps has been a reflexive habit that's proven hard to beat.
I hate having a multitude of windows open at a given time, even on the Mac. Why do I need five pages of an internet browser, a media player, three chats on a messenger, four versions of a text editor etc. open at once? In Windows, it means tons of alt-tabbing and slowing down the machine. But even on the Mac, it still means having to go through each window of a program in order to get to the one that you want and the way to do that is more complicated than with Windows. It just makes sense to close things that you don't need. But as an experiment, good luck.
Well this was more for iOS users and I know you're dedicated against iOS, as much a fanchild of things old school as are some shiny happy Apple fanchildren, but the simple answer is that on one of these devices, how many apps open never gets in your way.
That being said, I've continued to close down Youtube, any game, certainly Pandora when I'm not using it. I'm not sure it really matters about the rest, as if you close them down for the most part, you still get your notifications, so they must register a demon or spooler or something someplae, or whatever the iOS equivalent of those would be.
There may be some merit to leaving apps open, aside from not losing your place, but I don't know what that would be.
ok. I have several things to say on this-none of this is meant as critisism but it's important to keep all this in mind.
1.
The new iPods have 256 mb of ram, just as the old 3rd gens do.
2. The iPhone 4 and the new iPod touch will use more ram. This is because ram is allocated to the graphics of each application. This applies to the older iPod too, however the retina display in the new one means that more ram is taken to process the higher res images. Need proof? Fine. Use an app called XSysInfo, it also lists your system graphics ram used. The app updates a lot and voiceover has problems with it, though so far I haven't found a great memory cleaning app besides that one which updates but doesn't interfeer with VoiceOver that much. xSysInfo is the best one. Yes, all one word: xsysinfo
2. When you close an app, it's still in ram. On my new iPod, I've gone down to 1.5 mb ram free. Why? because the apps are still in ram and iOs doesn't close them. I can have around 4 apps on average on the new 4g and 9-10 on the iPhone 4 (even 15) open without ram going down drastically.
3. The algorithm (there is one) for closing goes apps like this. After ram is exhausted:
-3rd party appstore apps (In the order they were last used, one unused the latest goes first)
-MobileSafari
-Notes, Clock, Contacts, etc. (Anything that doesn't get data consistently)
-Mail, Phone, SMS, etc. (Anything that get's data consistently)
-SpringBoard (By now, you would have frozen)
so. There you have it. my opinion on ram. Will I still close apps? yes! It's important and a healthy thing to do. I've had skype close on me before because I had 10-15 apps open. Yes, right, skype, the all mighty skype. the all mighty all mighty skype closed. I was highly mad at that time and after that I haven't stopped closing apps on my own.
The difference between iOS and adnroid? when you close an app, it becomes (ans is moved to) inactive or "wired" memory. So it sort of goes to stand by, almost like, oh, what do they call that medical procedure when they freeze you? cryogenics. Seriously.
Sooo.. Research. please. Apple wants to really dumb down it's consumers. This has advantages and disadvantages. Your iPhone/iPod/iPad is a computer inside. Always remember, never forget the roots our founding computer fathers have set.
Here's an idea that you've not touched. Older ram was slower, so their for could not process as much. I'm not sure of the speed at the I pones, or pads, or pods run, but that is surely a factor? Also what are their processor speeds? Interesting subject.
My topic was a bit humorous to be honest, and I can't say I don't close apps. However, no matter what is running, I have yet to see a freeze or a Winblows type lockup behavior. Generally if VoiceOver stutters it's probably competing with audio or process priority, something entirely different than RAM. These are single-core processors as are all mobile processors, so no matter what OS, one can run into the proverbial bumping heads with task priority.
So your claim is that apps don't really leave memory? I'll have to examine this more closely, I use an app called SysInfo and have seen memory usage go down, but also see it go back up again if I dump a particularly large app. If apps have push, they probably keep a demon or a service running, but not the entire app.
As to your comments about 'dumbing down', that's more a political word than anything else.
In 1996, Bill Gates claimed (on release of Windows 95) that computer users like to tweak and fiddle with their computers like men did with their cars in the 1950s. While I can see there are a few, usually students, users who like doing this, most of the world wants to *use* them.
Frankly the experiment I've done with my iPod is to use it the exact same way my fellow Coasties tend to use theirs: Use some cloud apps to sync my data in the cloud, and just use it. I don't fiddle with it much, I just use it as an accessory or an appliance if you will. With 15 plus years software development and IT experience, one could hardly call me dumbed down. A hopeless realist, perhaps, understanding that if devices want to become ubiquitous, their power is in the little amount of maintenance to high amount of productivity you get out of it.
I was simply challenged, somewhat jokingly, by a long-time Apple user on this. And no, I haven't gone fool, but more to the point, the device tends to behave in quite a rugged fashion.
Generally there tend to be other factors, not memory management, in play when something isn't working right. Sure, I'll restart an app that's crashed: any programmer knows you're likely to get better performance that way. But rather than go into Task switcher and start closing a bunch of apps, I tend to look elsewhere first for solutions to a problem, and more often than not, it tends to work.
Why on Earth would anyone design a computer etc. so that it didn't fully close a program when you tell it to do so? That makes absolutely no sense. I'm not saying it's untrue, I just can't figure out the reasoning behind it.
performence
I know i sounds kinda dam. But how do i close apps in my iphone4?
I mean what's the equivalent of altF4 or commandQ in iOS4?
just tap the home button once it will close the program down. If I am wrong someone correct me.
As to how to close an app:
Double tap the home button and you now have a task switcher.
Double tap and hold on the screen till you hear the tone warble: if you're sighted you'll see an icon juggle and you will just tap and hold not double tap and hold.
Now, double tap the program you want to close and it will go away. If you've got vision and not using VoiceOver you just tap.
OK as to why programs don't completely vacate memory:
This is not just iOS, even DOS did this in part.
The part or module that stays is that part which helps it load the next time you run it: helps it get you back to where you were. Not all programs do this, and some run what are called servicesin Windows, traditionally spoolers / demons in the Unix world, I have no idea what Apple people call them now - we called them Extensions when we supported Apple System 7.
There are really good reasons for this, and as long as there has been some form of extensible memory, be it cache, even the old expanded memory, or whatever, programs have done this. Some operating systems are better at garbage collection - the process by which unused memory is wiped - than others. We all know who poses the gravest challenges ... lol and its grandparent, the Quick and Dirty Operating System was by far no exception, although rather than the page faults or 'Illegal Operations' / 'We're sorry' errors, you just got a frozen machine that needed a reboot.
Lest said operating system feel offended, Apple's older systems - anything 6100 running System 7 / 8 or whatever would cough up the beloved System 11 errors / the beautiful bomb: as we used to say, same damned error, just looks prettier.
Tougher kernels like anything Unix and anything mainframe tend to dispense with this stuff a lot more cleanly For one thing, the kernel is completely separate from anything in the user space and related interfaces.
thanks sir!
Thank you sir! I stand corrected and appreciate your in put lio, shows how much I actually use my ipod.