Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

I usually close most windows when I'm not using them

I find the n900 is quick enough to start apps on an as-needed basis, but it's not got enough RAM to keep many open without pushing it into swap and slowing down the whole system.

As such I've probably only ever had a maximum of 4 windows on my dashboard. A conversations window, witter (twitter client), barriosquare (foursquare.com client) and web-browser.

While I love Maemo's approach to multitasking, the hardware just can't keep up. If the n900 had 1GB of real RAM it would be a completely different story - I'd be multitasking far more. With the hardware limitations though I find it's mostly quicker to just start apps as needed.

Cheers!

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

That's not quite right, look for "VmLck:" in /proc/[1-9]*/status.

This is pretty much how it's supposed to work There's also a daemon (ohmd) that's supposed to freeze non-whitelisted processes when critical stuff is happening, bug 6203 and the followup maemo-developers thread have some interesting info.

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

My thoughts exactly. The N900 really should've shipped with at least 512MB of RAM - mine gets horribly slow if I have media player (music), Mappero, Witter and a web browser open at the same time. FSM help if you if you've got a few apps open and then someone sends you an SMS. That doesn't seem like an unreasonable load to me, but maybe Mappero and/or Witter are bloated.

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

Mission completed!

The poll on multitasking is now closed. The results are impressive:more than 600 votes and more than 200 detailed comments.

In summary,
- over 80% keep typically 1 to 6 applications open on the multitasking view of the Nokia N900
- over 97% of all respondents pro-actively manage the amount of open apps
- only less than 1.5% of all respondents do not close apps actively and leave them all open
- at least 35% of all people detailing their open apps keep various third-party apps open

The final report has been uploaded now on slideshare under http://www.slideshare.net/peterschne...asking-in-n900

So, what happens with the results? You might be surprised.
As indicated at the invitation to this poll, the results such as "Close to 50% of technology enthusiasts using Nokia N900 keep typically 4 to 6 apps open." have become part of the product marketing material for Nokia's MeeGo 1.1 solution.

But, beyond this, the interim results have been made available to the Director Product Management, Director Product Development Program, VP MeeGo Computers R&D (Ari Jaaksi), Harmattan Chief UI designer, and many more. Actions have been initiated already from product management side.

The high amount of pro-active open apps management (over 97%) has led to an additional consideration on how the new Nokia MeeGo UI can maintain an easy way to open and close apps. The fair share of open third-party apps also should have an impact on the system architecture studies currently supporting the UI optimization.

Your contribution as a community and as individual in this poll is very much appreciated. This poll is naturally only one out of many insights in creating an iconic UI design, yet an important one. I'd like to thank also the Community Council to rally the troops to bring in more feedback to this poll.

As this was very useful, at least for me, I will try to do it again, probably on usage of Flash in the browser and plug-ins into the contacts/IM applications. Until then, thanks!

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

Well, bad timing on my part: I posted a blog article directed to this just before it closed. That sure doesn't look good... :(

http://tabulacrypticum.wordpress.com...ts-your-input/

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

For whats its worth..
Together with Modified Hildon Desktop where I can easily switch windows with just keyboard I *always* open up a lot of different web pages. This is of course several instances of the same application.

(I read a lot of news from the Internet all day long)
I start MicroB, open up first news link, switch back to MicroB link page, open second news link and so on.
I use Firefox and I always open my news tab in one go(~15 news sites). Although I haven't found how to do it on the N900 the method I described is ok for me, or rather it is very good(considering it is a phone).

I love being able to switch between the windows like that. One thing which would be nice is if it was possible to open web links in background just as in Firefox because that means I can sift through the webpage from top to bottom, open the links I know I want to read and then after have gone through the main page start reading the various articles that were of interest (open already in background windows).

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

Dear Peter,

I hope now you and the Director Product Management, Director Product Development Program, VP MeeGo Computers R&D (Ari Jaaksi), Harmattan Chief UI designer, and many more will realize how much potential help this community can offer to Nokia. I think you know that you have the most talented and loyal community members out here and we are willing to help. However in order to maintain good relationship with this community please provide support to N900 and kindly notify persons mentioned above about issues that bother most users.

Thank you

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

Oops! I guess I haven't been too clear on that this runs only for 2 days. Speedy feedback was needed.

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

i don't believe there's a word for 'options' in finnish.

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

Understood. I have just been under the gun at work and just now got a breather to put something decent together. It just never entered my mind the poll would run as short as two days... I was thinking maybe a week or so to get good numbers. Oh well.

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

I usually run instant messengers, few chat windows, couple of browser windows, ssh in terminal together with vpn connection.

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

I usually have a few applications running.

Conboy for notes taking, Calendar then possibly browser at the same time waiting in the background.

When going out for a run I have media player and eCoach running at the same time. That is also place where multitasking fails, when N900 tries to get GPS signal before the run, connect to online services and play music at the same time. Annoying new mixes by choked up machine.

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

I usually keep about 4 apps running. Conversations for texting (i text a lot), web for facebook and things like that, music player and app manager. app manager seems to lagg up my phone A LOT when it is installing an app, but only for 10 seconds ish, hope this can be fixed. :D
and also the most apps ive multitasked was 32, i tried 33 and my phone turned off.

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

Thanks VOLT, I couldn't decribe it better. I actually do subscribe each one of your words. I'm just new with N900 and its multitasking feature (though I come from Nokia's World; always Nokia since I have a mobile). This means that I'm usually connected and running the Application Manager (typical maemo.org ones, not others not trustable -after flashing once-) and that really strains many of phone resources. Up to the point that it seems to hang or crashed when, in between, I receive a phone call. It's just annoying and frustrating not being able to answer adequately, when for me this is the first and main functionality of my N900 (otherwise I'd use a tablet or a desktop PC): slow work, full of background noise, black screen with no possibility to close any running application, .... Really, this is not a phone sometimes, it might be the best multitasking device in the world, but not a smartphone. And what to say about the time the screen spends spinning and deciding by itself about portrait or landscape mode before showing the touchable buttons to pick the call or to reject it. I think the phone call functionality must work perfectly over all the rest of functionalities (if not, I'll go for an iPhone ).

It's a very good idea what volt suggests: to keep and reserve some memory slot for this phone call functionality to work properly and in real time.

I do hope excitedly to have such an improvement in next OS updates. Meanwhile, I will not be a fan of your multitasking feature. It's very difficult for me to spread the goodness of my N900 while this phone-call functionality does not match my basic needs for a smartphone.

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

Apps open occasionally in meetings:
email
conversations
browser
calendar
xjournal or an texteditor

I hit 1-3 as this is for meeting times

normaly I got conversations & calendar open

I guess calls do not count...

for performance:

If you want to use your phone don't take a picture ahead as trackerd or thumbnailer will eat your device.
It does not matter how many apps are open, if only one of it likes to hug the mmc you are done with it... no response for minutes... so it is not only the RAM as many people claim, sure low amount of RAM and constantly swapping makes it worse!
I guess if one of us is looking into hardware details someone will come up with a pretty good idea for a hardware-setup to prevent the device from freezing while transferring files to ext. SD... improve the data pipes!

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

Well, now that the actual polling has ended, time to get down to the real skinny :)

These days, I use the N900 a lot as a reader.

I have three or so programs open:

FBreader, Zim, and a browser.

I am constantly switching from FBreader to Zim to take notes on what I am reading. I really wish there was an easy way to go to the last thing open like Alt Tab does. Ctrl Bksp doesn't do it adequately, because then I have to choose what program to go to. I already know -- I usually want to go direct to Zim and then direct to FBreader.

Once in awhile I want to look up a word (or place) mentioned in FBreader, so I typically go to the browser for that.

Sometimes I open a map program so I can (where's Frodo? Where's Ayla? Where's the killer?) follow the action.

I hope that the Kindle sometime makes such switching easy. Or the N900. An easier Alt-Tab feature (back to the last window you used) would be great.

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

Lol i m located in the 2.70% ...

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

i usually have fbreader constantly open in the background, so i can quickly get back to my book during dull moments. other than that, i'm a bit wary of battery life and the time taken to swap the phone app in, so i tend not to multitask too much

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

I use to have 3 to 5 windows opened. Browser, mails, xTerm...I use to avoid having more than that as I a only one brain ;-)

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

As many others have already pointed out something similar, I too tend to close any unused window to save resources. It's quite annoying when the device gets unresponsive, especially when you try to answer a phone call.

Also, while not a separate window, I'm mostly online on several accounts. I feel having this ability is true multitasking, since surprisingly many devices are not able to do it in the background. However, this seems to be very resource hungry. When moving between 3G and Wi-Fi, the reconnecting makes the device almost unresponsive for fairly long time and Bluetooth headphone becomes useless during that time.

But despite of these shortcomings, the N900 has the best multitasking of any hand-held device I have ever used. I just hope that the future MeeGo products would have more RAM and processing power, so that unresponsiveness would be a thing of the past. Also, I think volt had some great ideas in this post.

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

if performance and battery life weren't a concern i would have many more windows open


btw, about closing the poll, why not leave it open so the results can be improved over time?

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

I use it to have 4 or 5 browser windows open. Might have my conversations and email open too with the browser windows. I also like to stream multitask, such as run ecoach download maps and stream libre.fm with vagalume at the same time. It runs ok, but always have a thirst for better performance!

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

I use between 7 and 12 applications usually when working with external keyboard and between 3 and 6 with the N900 without sitting.

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

I missed the poll... and I must say, it is very different. The most of the day I have only 2 applications open. But sometimes I use up to 12 applications...

But I have a small message for Peter@Maemo Marketing: the maemo multitasking is NOT the best and improvable!

I improved my N900 multitasking using 2 small modifications:

• Solution #1 from this Brainstorm: shortcut_to_switch_between_running_applications

• The application ShortCutD form Maemo extras to get [CTRL]+[BACKSPACE] at a Camera Button press.

Now I have a fast possibility to switch between 2 applications simply by pressing the camera button twice. This helps a lot when you have to add a calender entry and have to look back at the email with the appointment and many other user cases. It's fast as hell and can rival with my desktop computer!

I would love to see something like this at meego integrated. And the source for a maemo fix does already exists. A developer has only to integrate it to the official hildon-desktop to give this superb feature to all users.


Edit: Oh, I have to add a small comment:
I really MISS the possibility to playback a video in the background! (to check emails during watching a movie)

This worked at symbian just nice. At Maemo it is since PR1.1 impossible (only because of the graphical artefacts at other applications)

It would be nice to make the video playback in the background possible simply by disabling the video output and let only the audio playback running. (not easy but possible to integrate)

Edit 2:
And I would prefer seperated applications for Audio and Video playback. The usercase is very different and it is a pain and against the scope of multitasking to totally exit your actually playing music album to playback a short movie and to go back and search your music album again. 2 seperate applications would be distinctly better.

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

For me
i always keep the Music player on ( i drive a lot ) so i hear my fav. music on the Radio ( using the FM Transmitter ) all the time.
and ofcourse the Phone app. and the Conv. app.

I feel the music player use lots of battery, and its kind of heavy
if nokia coiuld create a music player that play music without the need to lunch the Music player app. and to save some RAM and Battery
that would be great :)
ohh and the Phone App, if i didnt keep it running all the time
i feel when i get a phone call the phone will go slowly to start ringing and flipping the screen and all that.
:)
and the phone does freez a lot
but still its my fav. phone ever :)

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

Interesting. This doesn't work for me. When I hit Ctrl-Bksp once, it opens the multi-windowed view. Hitting Ctrl-Bksp again does nothing.

I do have Shortcutd installed. When I push half down on the camera button, I get to what I am calling the multiwindowed view. When I do it again, nothing happens -- in other words, the same thing that when I hit Ctrl-Bksp happens.

In Shortcutd I have Use the camera button checked and Camera focus short press action as Dashboard. Dashboard is the same thing I am calling multiwindowed view.

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

You have to install both modifications. But be carefull with the first one. See this Brainstorm how it should work and see this post how to install it. But search and read at this forum first to follow the steps.

And I must admit, I'm currently not using Matan's latest version. I'm only using the first one that worked without problems at PR1.2, simply because I don't use the other features the modified hildon-desktop gives us. :)

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

Have 5+ apps always open. And all day to day stuff like web, emails, maps, chat etc...

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

why was the poll closed so fast? DOH!!

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

WTF why is the damn Poll closed!! this is n00b!

i use between 4 and 6 apps

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

xchat,
pidgin,
logged into gtalk and skype through "Availability",
browsers multiple (many windows and that can be like maybe 5 or 7 or 10 or more),
notepad,
conversations,
media player (usually i dont use it as much as when browsing and chatting a lot bcuz it slows down n900 and i hate it when it happens so i'm forced to close it. I wud LOVE to have it running and never giving me any lag),
xterminal (not a heavy user of it, just playing with it usually learning linux)

I dont ever use any email application (not on my laptop or any mobile device), i'm just a browser gmail user (love n900's browser but i just hope the swap stuff or internal ram worked very very very very very very very fast !!! plz give the next meego device a 768mb ram, plz take an initiative and dont wait for apple or someone to tell u that its ok now to have 768mb on mobiles .. plz plz plz *lead* the market .. and we r not getting device for free right? we are paying a lot of dollars, so let us have it .. )

btw, i love <3 the ctrl + backspace !!!

LOVE gPodder since i have started using it.

So all these apps just go on opening and closing on demand and i'm not concerned that bcuz "that one app" is running so i cannot open the other one (except for media player) .. I LOVE this freedom that n900 gives me.

Something I'm concerned about: I was reading at few places about what Apple has done to multitasking, and android too. I'm not so technically aware of android and apple, but about maemo i consider n900's multitasking as "pure" imo. I know that n900 is not at all as smooth as iphone 4 in UI XP, but i DONT want Nokia to give me iphone 4's smoothness by killing n900's kind of multitasking in the next high end MEEGO device. I'm saying this bcuz when one company has earned a lot of dollars on a product X, other companies try to follow it in a way that seems a blind-following, and may end up copying/following things/features that were NOT the real cause contributing to the success of the lead company's Product X and in turn hurting themselves. Also plz do not make a decision on the next devices based on avrg users using only 4 or 5 apps.

Thanks.

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

gPodder and Mauku are my faves

(Yes I am aware there are other Twitter apps that do more but I cant really dig how they look...:p....Mauku just looks best to me.. BTW when will it be fixed?, Got two updates about the widget but the main app is still not working)

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

As always, Nokia has NO idea of what makes a good UI, how come it isn't possible to use the KEYBOARD to select the app/window to switch to? There is a friggin keyboard on the N900, why isn't the UI making good use of it :mad:

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

modified-hildon-desktop has this feature. Details here:

http://my.arava.co.il/~matan/repo/Mo...n_Desktop.html

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

You should be multitasking with one browser window open to here at all times, man!

Or Peter wanted to wrap this up with plenty of time left for him to generate pretty graphs for a presentation he was giving at the end of last week.

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

1-3 apps. Just my way. More could be open, but I have a habit of closing open doors behind and in front of me

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

I use multitasking quite a bit, though not terribly heavily. Maybe 2-4 apps at a time. Email, a web browser, media player, weather report, things like that.

After the Debian-ness of the n900's OS, being able to run multiple apps at once was the reason I got an n900. I can't imagine using a phone (or any type of computer!) without multitasking!

Re: How do you use multitasking in N900?
 

I always use multitasking, when I'm browsing the web, especially on this forum, when I'm messing around on my N900 file manager, mc/xterm open and 2-3 web pages for reference. I love multitasking and after 1.3 + swappolube and a bit of OC is working nicely. More memory and processing power would be handy with extended battery life of course.... or at least a solar powered charger:)