One of my favorite features of a modern desktop OS is the ability to kill threads, and abort applications that have become unresponsive. Ideally, the OS would work this out for me, but it doesn’t so I am okay with doing this myself.
The S60 platform is clearly a tiny little computer. And it seems to have a health monitoring system in place. I crashed the hell out of all my browsers the other week playing with some embedded flash on mobilized web pages, and after a while the phone restarted all by itself. It was clearly some sort of “I am crashed, better restart now” system, as it was much faster than usual, and there was none of the “3G” meteor animation that AT&T installed for the normal startup.
Neat, but not universal. The other day the Gmail app crashed. The protected memory worked great and I could run all other apps just fine. But I cannot quit the crashed application. Finally, after three days, I decided last night I had some spare time (I do use the phone constantly) and restarted.
The S60 even has an application switcher; offering running app management would be trivial in teh GUI, and I suspect (due to the auto-restart) is relatively easy from a function perspective as well. Smartphones are complex enough now that this sort of non-happypath function needs to be addressed today.
There are a few task managers that might help you here. I use Handy Taskman and have found I’m able to kill, not just quit things when they go wonky … saves me the hassle of a restart and lets me then re-launch things (like gmail) without a problem.
That task manager does look nice. Too bad its not free, or better yet, included with the OS.
Maybe I’ll buy it anyway when I pay off my Christmas expenses.
Not sure whether you were referring to this already, but hitting the ‘c’ key while using S60 application manager attempts to ‘force’ the application to quit.
Ah!!!! That does it. In case its a different icon on your phone (I hear Nokia is messing with these lately) the backspace key within the task list offers up an “Exit [this application]?” Dialogue. Not sure how good it is at forcing quits, but at the least it sure makes it easier when I need to free up memory and have left open the address book, text messaging and log apps by accident.
I could gripe about no-affordance interfaces (one of my favorite complaints) but I am so happy to have a new hint I’ll refrain. For now.