Peter@Maemo Marketing | # 171 | 2010-09-09, 04:36 | Report

Yes, I agree, while some logic to apps and battery optimization is mandatory. You don't want to have a video running in the background while the app is still open, right? Anyway, I'll quote you in my summary of this poll.

ossipena | # 172 | 2010-09-09, 05:31 | Report

the biggest annoyance for me is simply app closing quietly and hidden. video and games etc pausing is not an issue imo. I thought a lot about fremantle multitasking (usb-port fell off, using c5 atm) and why android, ios and symbian just can't stand comparision in my eyes. "we have 'multitasking', the app in the background might be there when you next time check or then not and you have to go through menu hell in order to get it back up" is total dealbreaker for me.

benny1967 | # 173 | 2010-09-09, 06:23 | Report

this is probably not what you mean, but as you mentioned "video" and "background":
one thing i really hate is how the media player automatically pauses a video as soon as you ctrl+backspace to another task. that's trying to be smart. i can manually pause a video if i want to. usually though, switching away from a running clip without pausing it means i want to answer an sms or refresh the web page that shows my trains current delay... it's like turning around for more beer when you're watching tv at home. you don't want the show to pause for these 3 seconds. you still follow the dialogs while you refill your glass.... and you wouldn't look away in the middle of an action-packed scene that requires full attention, anyway. so why cant i read an incoming message while at least the audio of my clip still plays on?

i don't want to start a discussion on this particular "feature" (already happened elsewhere). it's just an example: don't let such things become too "smart". they usually get in the way then.

leviathan3k | # 174 | 2010-09-09, 07:38 | Report

Shortcutd can be set up to turn either the camera button's first detente (as in, press it in partway) or the proximity detector just below the front camera into a "show all windows" button.

pelago | # 175 | 2010-09-09, 09:37 | Report

I agree completely. I suppose I would want a video to pause automatically if there was an incoming call, but otherwise I would like to be able to make the choice whether to manually pause it or not before task switching. I very often would like a video (in my case usually TV programs) to continue playing the audio while I briefly task switch to something else.

shadowjk | # 176 | 2010-09-09, 10:01 | Report

It's not that accessing emmc consumes alot of CPU or that it's not DMA, it's that the CPU has nothing to do. When each request to the emmc start taking a quarter second, the CPU runs out of stuff to do, every app needs something to be pushed out to emmc to make room for something else that's also coming from emmc.

Basically the RAM is too small, and emmc (and any microsd to date) is too slow to keep the CPU fed with code to execute.

sowande1.0 | # 177 | 2010-09-09, 11:28 | Report

Took the words right outta my mouth! That is the most important aspect of multitasking to me, being able to let something like the app manager do its thing and move on to other tasks since it can be pretty slow.

The key aspect to me is being able to see the status of the other tasks (windows loading, etc.). That is amazing.

lma | # 178 | 2010-09-09, 11:44 | Report

Do give ramzez a try, really. It may sound a bit scary but remember that so did swap on eMMC back in the 770 days and it turned out to work quite well. So well in fact that Nokia productised it in later tablets and now the N900 ships with a 768M dedicated swap partition and swappiness set to 100 (though I suspect it may be a good idea to tune this down a bit with ram-based swap).

gunni | # 179 | 2010-09-09, 11:44 | Report

I dont use it much because of the fear decreasing battery life.

Necc | # 180 | 2010-09-09, 13:12 | Report

I has the same 3 window all the time.
1) media player witch plays local music while i move, or netradia when i'm at work
2) xchat IRC client when i'm on the move (otherwise it runs from my PC/laptop)
3) Easy debian

Inside easy debian i also run some more apps.

Sometimes i go above 3 window, but it is rare (mostly all i do is open conky, xterm -> root -> kill hildon-xxx process witch keeps CPU usage at 100% for minutes, pointlessly or makes the desktop unresponsive for minutes).


The only one feature what i realy miss from the task manager is the ability to drag and drop opened window into an order what i want (A similar function what windows 7 offers on the taskbar.). It simply irritates me if i can't reach this permanent 3 opened window from the exact same locations all the time, while from my laptop at work i always find that 8 permanently opened apps from the same places on the taskbar.