Usability Review of OpenMoko GTK+ Applications

[Shawn Rutledge]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 8:20 AM, Esben Damgaard <ebbe at skummer.com> wrote:
>  But for some more hardcore stuff: You shouldn't have to close programs.
>  This is not good usability. Instead give the option, but if we run out
>  of ram, the OS should close the oldest program. But then a program
>  should be able to say to the OS that the program is meant to be running
>  for a long time.. Or maybe this is a bad idea..

I suggested that a long time ago: the important thing is not closing
the current app, but getting back to the main menu.  It should work
more like PalmOS, because the user doesn't usually care in what state
the current app is, he only cares which one he's going to run next.

Interestingly, now that the iPhone SDK is out, I read that it runs
only one app at a time!  So no multitasking. (Hopefully they at least
made it possible to play music in the background while you are doing
other things.  That must be an OS feature then, rather than just an
application.)  I bet the need for multitasking will come up, and
either they will eventually have to retrofit some support for
background processes or threads, or maybe they've already thought of
that.

So if we have a "main menu" touchscreen button, always visible, then
either policy could be implemented: either it closes the current app,
or leaves it running in the background and then potentially closes it
later.  That way there is room for successive refinement.  But
personally I think multitasking is sometimes useful, and anyway it can
save time not to re-load some apps which are frequently used.

The decision to close it could be based on CPU and I/O usage: if it's
obviously doing something useful (but being nice about it), leave it
running; but if it's hogging 100% CPU (or nearly) then prompt the
user, whether to kill it.  When there is memory pressure, the apps
which are not doing anything would be the first ones to close in order
to free some memory.