Killing a task

Thanks for answering my question on how to quit an app. I think it's a great way. The only other way that I could think of would be a dragging out like on the dock in OSX, but what they have is ok. Also I'm glad the apps don't disappear after shutdown.
Lou

Those of us with iPhones have been dealing with this for months and I agree that it could be easier but it isn't too bad.

A quick solution could be tapping the home key sends the app to the running list as it currently does while holding the home button for a second would terminate the app. It is such a simple solution that I'm sure Apple has thought of it and must have a good reason why they didn't implement a simplier full terminate mechanism.

I watched this same discussion when the Android phones came out. Everyone rushed out to load task killers onto their phones. In the Android OS, the system will kill an idle program if it needs the memory, no user intervention required. Unlike a Blackberry or Windows Mobile (at least the older versions0, there is no need to manually exit programs. Killing tasks willy nilly actually had a tendency to reduce battery life because the system would have to keep relaunching things that the user had quit but that the system needed.

I'm not quite as familiar with the nuts and bolts of 4.2 but it would not surprise me if memory is managed in a similarly smart fashion. In the playing I've done with my iPad since the update, I haven't found there to be any performance issues and I haven't worried about quitting anything. Time will tell.

So how do we exactly kill the task? I didn't figure it out yet.

Happened this morning when I was playing Ministry of Sound radioapp that Play/Pause button in the player didn't work. I wasn't able to stop the music playing so I had to power whole iPad off.

Certainly this can't be the only way and especially if the app stays in the task list?

If you want to remove an app from the taskbar (and being on it doesn't necessarily mean that it's active as it also shows the most recently opened apps), then open the taskbar (double-click the home button) and press and hold one of the apps that's shown there until they start shaking; then press the minus symbol on any that you want to remove; pressing the home button stops the shaking.

Thanks a bunch!

I didn't think it was a "multitask" screen - it's a "recently used" screen.

The multitasking bar, double tap the home button, shows three classes of apps:

1. Recents, those that were used in order of use, that are not running.
2. Those that are suspended or sleeping.
3. Those that are running in the background.

The difficult part is knowing which apps fall into which category. The only ones that one really needs to terminate are the apps running in the background as they use cpu and memory resources. The cpu management system is very good at prioritizing cpu usage, a part of the Unix operating system from back in the 80's. With the iOS form of the system the user cannot access control over the prioritization routine. So you are stuck with what has been programmed into the iOS.

Tasks running in the background use resources and battery charge. Unless you really need them, that is, they are doing something for you that you want done, go to the multitasking bar and terminate them. I do that daily with all apps just to make sure I have full resources and to maximize battery life.

Ralph Landry1 wrote:
Tasks running in the background use resources and battery charge. Unless you really need them, that is, they are doing something for you that you want done, go to the multitasking bar and terminate them. I do that daily with all apps just to make sure I have full resources and to maximize battery life.

And I never bother and have seen no reductin in speed or battery life since upgrading. In fact, I seem to have experienced somewhat better battery life. So, for me, it's certainly not worth the bother of worrying about it. YMMV.

Omenahillo wrote:
So how do we exactly kill the task? I didn't figure it out yet.

Happened this morning when I was playing Ministry of Sound radioapp that Play/Pause button in the player didn't work. I wasn't able to stop the music playing so I had to power whole iPad off.

Certainly this can't be the only way and especially if the app stays in the task list

Notice you jumped on a thread more than a month old, and one started and ended very shortly after the upgrade was released? There was a lot of angst about this issue, and a lot of sturm und drang being shared, before folks started figuring out what was actually going on.

You've missed those threads, so here's a link to my low-tech explanation of what actually happens. There are many others in these and other forums. And of course how it works is also laid out in your User's Guide.

http://discussions.apple.com/messageview.jspa?messageID=12719950&stqc=true