TaskManager is one ugly piece of... UI

Brad Midgley bmidgley at gmail.com
Thu May 10 16:40:22 CEST 2007


Hey

After spending a day or so working over my P1, I have to ask if the
TaskManager is slated for removal or improvement. It is the single worst
component of user interface on the whole device...

- switching apps on every other platform is a single click on the task name
- selecting the application from a "fuzzy" list and clicking on a horseshoe
with a green blob is not intuitive
- TaskManger ends up looking like the Home menu but of course behaving
totally differently
- the X on the left sometimes closes the task manager and sometimes closes
an app depending on the selection
- it's not clear what the turning arrow button does until you use it a few
times
- it's not clear what the benefit or advantage is to closing the task
manager or clicking the turning arrow to hide it
- when it's "running" the task manager takes a slot in the
lower-right-corner switcher button, adding further confusion

I see two ways to improve it:

1. Remove TaskManager entirely. Use the other switcher and fix the "close"
option in the apps so it doesn't kill the bottom bar.

2. Make the lower-left-corner button bring up a popup menu with each
application listed and an X after each name if you wanted to close it. (It
could even be scrollable or tiled if it'll grows too long, but that will be
the unusual case.) With a popup, we get back to what people expect in task
switching and it's simple and clear to understand what this thing is for. It
also would "go away" when you click somewhere else instead of cluttering up
the notion of what is running.

There's plenty of talk about how neo compares to iPhone and we have a huge
potential here to show them up in some areas, but I do know Apple would
never let such a flawed UI element out the door.

Brad
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