Killing an app.

[ccomley]

Is there a tool to kill an app completely.

Flipping it off the WebOs screen does NOT fully shut the app down - it remembers stuff abotu where it was and what it was doing. Which means it remembers stuff it's doing wrong! At the moment the only option appears to be a full shutdown and re-start of the tablet which takes the best part of five minutes!

The browser occasionally jams up, at which point it won't work properly in some websites, not least Gmail and Facebook.

And this week I had Kindle jam up - it would let me flip past the first few pages of a book then show a blank white screen. Flip-off re-starting it would let me start over - and it'd end the same. AFTER i ranted at amazon to refund me for a book coz I assumed the file was corrupt, I found it was failing on all files, and a reboot of the tablet fixed it.

So - how to "kill -9" an app?

[Cantaffordit]

did you install Jstop from preware?

[ccomley]

Originally Posted by Cantaffordit

did you install Jstop from preware?

Nope. I'll go look for it...

Cheers.

[wayne@angrygoat]

As a developer, I can tell you that flicking away an app does kill it completely, unless the app uses PDK plugin or possibly a JavaScript service. If either of those things are the cause of the problem, then jstop probably wouldn't help.

An app may remember what it's doing by saving it's when it exits, that doesn't mean the app hasn't stopped.

-- Sent from my HP TouchPad using Communities

[fxspec06]

You don't kill apps.

You assassinate them (by flicking them away).

[eblade]

I throw them with a giant rubber band andhear a weeeeee sound

-- Sent from my HP TouchPad using Communities

[errhead]

I have noticed some apps seem to continue running in the background eating battery life faster than normal after flipping away, facebook being the worst offender. When i notice that some rogue process is draining the battery faster than normal i have to do a luna restart to clear whatever it is out.

[Grabber5.0]

Facebook does not continue running, it periodically launches a background process to check for updates, then closes again. That frequency is set in the settings for the app. The OS only gives your app an instant to clean up before it is terminated.

[ccomley]

Well, in that case, I guess I'm stuffed.

The two problems encoutered so far are

- the BROWSER - I don't use the Facebook app it's too fiddly by far - sometimes the browser gets itself into a state such that, even if you wait patiently for the page to load *completely*, some of the buttons on a Facebook or Gmail (or, presumably, others) do nothing. I assume the "on-click" code hasn't been loaded or something, I dunno. But re-loading the page doesn't help. Flickign away the browser and re-starting it, doesn't help.

- just this week, Kindle decided to "white-screen" and lock up on me a couple of pages in toa book. Again, flicking it away would recover but only to the cover-page of the book which as soon as I started turning pages would lock up again... a reboot fixed it.

If these issues are possibly based on the failure of a system module, I guess it's too fiddly to find out what that might be and how it may be re-initialised without rebooting the tablet.

[eblade]

Overclocking CPU?

-- Sent from my HP TouchPad using Communities

[ccomley]

Bog-standard. The only thing HP would not recognise and approve of that I have done is to use impostah to de-re-register it so I could access Kindle from the USAnian download zone, then switch back to the original profile. (And, of course, installed the devkit so I can install Preware in order to run Impostah).

I don't demand enough of it to need it to be faster! The only thing that is slow is a hard reboot, whicH I try to avoid needing to to!

[ccomley]

Originally Posted by wayne@angrygoat

As a developer, I can tell you that flicking away an app does kill it completely, unless the app uses PDK plugin or possibly a JavaScript service. If either of those things are the cause of the problem, then jstop probably wouldn't help.

An app may remember what it's doing by saving it's when it exits, that doesn't mean the app hasn't stopped.

-- Sent from my HP TouchPad using Communities

Not true. I have several examples now of where an app gets so tangled up you have to re-start the tablet. So either the app doesn't completely die when flicked away, or some apps have hooks into the OS and leave footprints which are not cleared/ reset/ whatever when you close the app.

As there appears to be no solution to this aside from hope the app author fixes it, it's a good job it doesn't do it too often...

[ccomley]

BTW - warning - if you use the built-in browser to play an internet radio station, tap "STOP" before you flick the browser app away, or ou won't be able to stop the stream playing except by rebooting the tablet!

[wayne@angrygoat]

Not true. I have several examples now of where an app gets so tangled up you have to re-start the tablet. So either the app doesn't completely die when flicked away, or some apps have hooks into the OS and leave footprints which are not cleared/ reset/ whatever when you close the app.

As there appears to be no solution to this aside from hope the app author fixes it, it's a good job it doesn't do it too often...

yes, some buggy apps do seem to leave stuff behind when they exit, but that's a bug and not the part of the normal operation of webOS which is what you are implying in your first post.

[appsotutely]

As mentioned before, JsTop will help you better identify the issue. Apps continue to run in Exhibition mode if they were the last running app when you exit Exhibition, so that's one way an app could continue to maintain state even if you toss away the main app card. Another is by having a dashboard component that is still alive. In either case, JsTop will show you if a particular app still has processes running even after you've tossed away the main card.

[ccomley]

It's not a question of "implying" what is "intended" in the OS, I was reporting what was actually happening, which is actually annoying.

[toaste]

I had read in another post, can't find it right quick, that said to ensure the app was closed you needed to do the "pull down and release" (like you do when the TP is upside down and you get the angry bird sound) vs just flicking it closed. I'll post it if I can find it again.

[ccomley]

Originally Posted by toaste

I had read in another post, can't find it right quick, that said to ensure the app was closed you needed to do the "pull down and release" (like you do when the TP is upside down and you get the angry bird sound) vs just flicking it closed. I'll post it if I can find it again.

Appreciate it.

Wonder if it works if you re-start then re-kill the app, as clearly if you've already killed it...

Why is nothing ever simple? :-)