iPhone: What’s Missing (5) – Multitasking

 Linux  No Responses »
Mar 232010
 

I am in two minds about the need for multitasking on the iPhone. I can see that it would be useful for applications such as music streamers such as the one for LastFM or Spotify (personally I prefer LastFM), but having multiple GUI programs running on a machine as small (in terms of hardware resources) as the iPhone could be problematic.

It could also make the iPhone less stable.

But there is a demand for running lightweight background tasks in a way with a only a small risk of interfering with the currently running GUI application.

It would be easy to allow too – just allow the iPhone application to fork a helper daemon with some means of controlling it. After all under that pretty skin, the iPhone is just an computer running OSX as anyone who has jailbroken it has probably found out.

Dealing With An Invisible Window With Enlightenment

 Computing, Linux  No Responses »
Mar 162010
 

Probably of not much use to most, but useful to me …

On occasions, I have been known to start an application and switch virtual desktops as the application window appears which can sometimes lead to Enlightenment (but the DR16 version) “displaying” the window in a non-visible location. Fortunately there is a convenient and fairly trivial fix for this :-

  1. Open a terminal window
  2. Display a list of windows with the command eesh window_list (or eesh wl for short).
  3. This displays a list of two columns – a window ID and the title of each window. Pick the window ID of the window that is not visible.
  4. Next iconify the window with the command eesh wop iconify ${window_id}.
  5. At this point the icon for the application window should appear in your iconbox and you can uniconify it with the mouse and it should appear on the currently displayed desktop.
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