Re: Multitasking on Android
 

There is no need to dig into details. I know Palm OS was single tasking, but save state or suspend, the effect was the same: you never closed an application, you just started a new one. When you then went back to the previous one, it resumed from the same state, i.e. it never started from zero.

With a handful of very rare exceptions, applications on neither OS even had the "Exit" option. On Symbian, it was even actively discouraged (by programming guidelines) for applications to have that option.

I have (thank Zarquon!) never owned a Symbian phone and have no extensive user experience with it, but I have a lot of programming experience and that alone made me never want to touch Symbian with a barge pole if I could avoid it. We had to go through hoops to follow the guidelines, such as #if-#endif to make "Exit" available for debugging but taken out from the release build. Yuck!

This is what now annoys me about Android. There is the "Back" button that, if you press it enough times, eventually closes the application. But does it really? The fact that you can never be sure is what I find rather irritating.

Re: Multitasking on Android
 

You are right, not many Symbian applications have an "Exit" option. However, that is because the right hardware button always closes the current application. No need to be redundant.



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Re: Multitasking on Android
 

I beg to differ. Most do have an Exit option. Especially the older ones. Even on my 808 many of built-in applications have Exit - Mail, Store, Music Player, etc.

Some apps have 3 ways to close

1. back arrow
2. Menu option
3. Hangup button

Some have only 1 or 2, and 3. And some like Camera can only be closed using 3.

Coming from some other company I would say it gives you choice, but coming from Nokia it's more of them being inconsistent and incompetent. One of the changes they made in the Belle upgrade was supposed to be an improved keyboard. The English input keyboard was a marginal improvement, but the Chinese input keyboard was a step back from the Anna version. And to make things worse some remnant of the Anna keyboards are still present after the upgrade and some applications would use those instead of the new ones.

Re: Multitasking on Android
 

I use the "hangup button" to close every application except Gravity (you have to use the "Exit" option in the menu to exit that).

I was merely adding to pichlo's personal experience with the "Exit" option in the development guidelines for Symbian. If I minimized the existence of the "Exit" option, I apologize.

I would like to add that I have never had an application be removed from the "open apps" by pressing a back button. The "hangup button" and "Exit" are the only ways I know of that happening.

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Re: Multitasking on Android
 

This seems relevant.

The comments range from people bad talking the N900, to people praising it. Everyone picking it apart to show why it is/isn't an amazing feat.

Re: Multitasking on Android
 

Calendar on the 808 has a back button that removes it from the open apps list. Music Player's back button does not remove it from the open apps list (which is probably the expected behaviour since you would want it to go into the background and continue playing). Like I said before, inconsistent and incompetent :)

Re: Multitasking on Android
 

Hmm... I could see a way to achieve real multitasking on Android.

1. Memory Locker to prevent apps from being killed
2. Binding one middle key to kill and app and launch the recent apps.

I assume that recent apps is cleaned of dead apps, otherwise we'd need a daemon for it.

Re: Multitasking on Android
 

If the calendar is your only example, it make sense that I am unfamiliar. Not being able to link it with my other calendars, I have never used the it.



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Re: Multitasking on Android
 

Technically, programs are always 'running' in PalmOS. This is because there's no distinction at all between storage and memory, and thus there's little difference between an "unloaded" and a "loaded" program in PalmOS (the difference is, basically, whether globals have been allocated or not).

In fact, e.g. if you created a socket and used the asynchronous IO equivalent to listen() or read() from it (more or less equivalent to Linux AIO's raise a signal when IO finishes), you would quickly realize that your signal callback would be called _even after going back to the launcher and switching programs_. That is how my 'background' FTP server for PalmOS worked.

Similarly, it was easy to malloc() something that would leak even if you 'switched' programs.
However, this was not the default. In practice, PalmOS worked like Android. When you get the notification that the user is going to the launcher, you just free() everything (or as much as possible). When you get launched, you load stuff back.

Unlike Android, no one would kill or "SIGSTOP" you if you decided to not free() everything.