Closing apps

Shawn Rutledge shawn.t.rutledge at gmail.com
Mon Nov 19 20:16:36 CET 2007


On Nov 18, 2007 4:20 PM, Olaf Lüke <olaf at uni-paderborn.de> wrote:
> Actually, yes you do ;-). Since the second version of the GUI you can
> close applications with pressing the power button shortly. If you press

IMO that's a very strange, and very unintuitive way to close
applications.  If the user is expected to close the app when he's
finished with it, there needs to be an obvious close button on the
GUI.

What I noticed is that you can click near the top left part of the
screen to get the menu of running applications, and switch to another
one.  So I assumed the idea was that you should not have to close apps
yourself.  Maybe the launcher will close apps automatically, to manage
memory as necessary?  So whenever memory is running low, it closes the
least recently used apps... something like that.  If data which the
user has entered or changed is always saved immediately, this is not
dangerous, and it's beneficial to the user to have his favorite apps
always running (as long as there is enough memory).  And when an app
is auto-closed, it's easy enough to launch it again the next time you
want it.

Then the apps all need good "session management" - remembering the
exact state of their views when they are closed, and restoring that
state when they are re-opened.  E.g. the browser should remember which
sites are open, and to what point they were scrolled; the contact list
should remember which contact was visible; etc.  This approach will
further reduce the impact of auto-closing: when the user launches the
same app again, he gets the same view again, just as if it was never
actually closed.




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