ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Davide Alberelli <dadexix86@xxxxxxxxx>]

2015-10-01 17:53 GMT+02:00 Alan Bell <alanbell@xxxxxxxxxx>:

> one of the particular strengths of the Ubuntu Touch UI is that you can see
> what apps are running and close the things you don't want. This is
> considerably easier on Ubuntu than it is on Android (long press of the
> button on the right that nobody knows what it does, then see your list of
> apps and wonder how to close them, then give up) On Ubuntu it is go to the
> switcher and swipe up or down to kill things.


I believe that the difficulty is the same on the two systems. The
difference in closing apps is between a swipe up/down (Ubuntu) or
left/right (Android), but it is just my impression.
What is definitely better in Ubuntu (IMHO) is the way and the simplicity
with one can switch between open apps, short swipe for previous app, long
swipe for the windows, move them, look at them, pick.
Close what you don't want there.


> This could be enhanced, to renice the applications. Drag them up a bit to
> make them faster, drag down to slow them to a crawl, swipe all the way down
> to kill nicely and swipe up to nuke it from orbit with a kill -9 (it is the
> only way to be sure)


I agree. But I would not introduce a complete different behaviour between
swiping up/down in the app management, that most of the future users will
not understand.

It would be nice to have 2 "rows" in the windows management though.
One "normal", central like now. And one slightly "above", where the window
is partially out from the scren.
Let me call these the "highlighted apps".
These are the apps that the user choose to live open and to override the
system settings about freezing and killing them. Then moving back them
below will "un-highlight" them and restore them as previous.

It might be useful to impose a limit on the highlighted apps, say at any
moment 50% of active CPU and RAM usage (so that the app in front has always
at least 50% CPU and 50% RAM available).
In my mind the general rule to un-highlight an app would be FIFO, like for
cached and closed ones now.
And maybe from the app informations (long press on icon) one should be able
to trigger to open such an app already highlighted.

This will also address a discussion occurred some time ago, about the
dialer that for somebody should always be open and active, no matter what.
By using the highlighting, the user will be allowed to really personalize
the experience around her/his needs.

This highlighting should probably also modify the niceness of the process
(do we still use niceness on the phone?), but I'm not sure about what this
would impact on the whole system.

Best,
Davide