Absolutely thunderstruck:

[jrittenhouse]

Originally published at . You can comment here or there.

Meredith showed me a neat trick for my iPhone and iPad, which shows all of the programs that remain loaded and sucking up battery juice on my devices.  HUGE list.  It also allows you to shut the things off - which I promptly did on both.

Comments

[seawasp]

and the trick is...????

[rono_60103]

Press the home button (the one just under the display) twice rapidly. The image on the display will shift up revealing the running apps. Just press and hold one of them until they start bouncing and display an "x" in a red circle. Pressing the x will cause the app to exit and release many of its resources.

[maiac]

Is that why my iPod does that when I press the home button? I thought it was showing me the most recently used apps on the assumption I'd want to switch back to one of them. That's how I've been using it, anyway.

[autopope]

Those apps are suspended but inactive. iOS dumps them from memory automatically whenever it tries to load a new app and discovers it's out of RAM. RAM has to be powered all the time, so killing them doesn't actually save you any power.

AIUI, the only significant exception is apps that use location/data services and receive push notifications -- they have to wake up in the background periodically to update their state, and location services really guzzle juice. But you can stop that happening by denying location service access to apps you see no reason to inform of your location.

Biggest power saver in my experience: switch off 3G or 4G data and location services globally. An iPhone running on GSM/EDGE with no GPS usage has a standby life of over a week.

[jrittenhouse]

Thanks for the comment, Charlie. I'll make a point of that. Otherwise, the speed of the thing seems to bog down when I've been busily on it for a while - my guess is that the memory's just full, and I'd be best off to close everything, reboot, and see what happens.

[crankyoldgoat]

ayep.

memory management is critical to system performance.

and, given all the systems I've dealt with, most memory management out there is poor (if I'm feeling kindly towards them when making the observation).

IBM's mainframes have the best memory management system, but it does require a real computer to run on, not a tinker toy.

[jrittenhouse]

I've worked on Mainframes, minis and PCs - under CP/M, Ubuntu, various flavours of DOS and Windows, not to mention iOS these days. (My wife and daughter faunch for a Mac, but until we can afford 'em, I stick with Win7, latest Ubuntu and iOS 6.whatever.

To me, a PC is easier to fool with. Very flexible in comparison to bigger iron, and frankly, I don't need large scale processing on that order. Even at work.

Work doesn't use a mainframe for CERCLIS, our **big** data base system for Superfund, but it's a weird puppy in any event. At one time, it ran on a Mini, and only four people could use it at a time - for a nationally used database with 15,000 users.

[jrittenhouse]

I *rarely* use 3G on my Verizon iPhone, so that's not an issue. I try to have a heart on my data usage (2gig and then pay through the nose per month)fiscal-responsibility- wise. I assume that with the traveling that you do, your cell (a) has a good international plan, and (2) a much higher amount of Wireless data use than I do. If you tell me you're on an unlimited data plan, I will weep real tears.

Of course, US telco rates on this stuff are really stiff.

Right now, I'm trying to figure on what I do and don't need to back up / sync through iCloud, since the one iWhatever account deals with a 32Gig iPad and a 16Gig iPhone with only 5Gig of iCloud space. If I were flush, I'd just ratchet the whole thing to the top level of 60G-ish worth of storage, but I have to have better than 5 Gig space for both machines.

[jrittenhouse]

Ron's answer was correct. Now that I've mastered the notion, I use it constantly.

[jrittenhouse]

What Ron said.

[jrittenhouse]

I rather thought so!