Usability Review of OpenMoko GTK+ Applications

[Esben Damgaard]

tor, 13 03 2008 kl. 10:17 -0700, skrev Shawn Rutledge:
[...] 
> 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.

I found that really odd. I don't think you can make a smartphone that
runs like DOS with graphics. Multitasking as a must. Consider being in
the midst of surfing the net (and having a few tabs open), then you get
a message. Woops. Need to close the browser to be able to write back?!
Even if the browser remembers all the open tabs, it need to download
them again. That is not wanted if surfing on GPRS net.

> [...]
>  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.

Maybe just have a few of the least used apps in a prompt (with their
memory usage) would be a cool idea. Then the user could choose
themselves.