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Originally Posted by pgh1969pa
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Originally Posted by cbf
Essentially everyone in this discussion, especially the Microsoft people has got this all wrong.
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Did you ever concieve that maybe *you* got it all wrong? I *like* the ability to have multiple *active* applications running at the same time instead of...to use your terminology "passivate" them and switch between them. Please don't ask me to explain or justify why it is necessary for *my* use because I'm more than capable of doing so. Accept it and move on. This argument has been made time and time again and your attempt to rehash them leads this into a off-topic discussion of Palm vs WM memory management and true multitasking vs passivation;-)
If the Palm model works for you, great...but please don't come here and try to tell people they are "wrong" because they don't drink the same Kool-Aid as you. Just because you view the world thru a narrow prism doesn't confine the rest of us to that same fate.
Futhermore, I will provide you a "real world" example of why "passivation" does not work for me. During business travel, I may be in need of a particular service, business, or resturant while I'm away from my hotel. In the car I can fire up BT to connect to my phone, start my navigation software, and launch Internet explorer. While the navigation software is determining my location, I can connect to the Google. Using Internet Explorer/Multi IE, I can automatically extract my current coordinates into Google along with my desired search and then place the destination into my navigation software. I need to be able to run the GPS navigation software and Internet Explorer/Multi IE concurrently. "Passivation" will not allow the active navigation software while performing the internet search. |
You obviously didn't understand my post, and you're quoting me out of context. I didn't say the load/save model for managing application was "wrong", I said labelling the discussion as a "memory management" issue was "wrong". It's really about the UI for managing persistent application state. How would you like it if by the time you switched back from getting your address information from Internet Explorer, your navigation application had been "closed" out from under you because the OS needed the resources? (Yes, this isn't too likely if you have enough memory, but the GPS app I run on my WM5 phone is pretty resource heavy, and if I've also got other apps going this could happen under the WM5 "memory management" scheme.)
You are defending Microsoft's decisision to not allow users to close applications on the grounds that you want to be able to quickly switch between applications. That makes no sense. Users of WinCE 1.0 could have more than one application active at the same time long before Microsoft removed the ability to manually close applications.
Yes, the old Palm OS couldn't support multiple processes running at once. This isn't the case with the current PalmOS (a Treo doesn't hang up the phone if you switch to another app to do something else), but that's beside the point. The essence of what I'm saying is that application state can be managed with explicit saves and loads. This is no way implies that only one application can be "active" (the confusion here is mostly from the fact that pocket devices don't typically have the screen real-estate to make it practical to have two applications *displaying* at once).
I'm simply saying that there is an alternative UI paradigm that relies on persistent state rather than saved and loaded files. Think Microsoft Outlook vs. Microsoft Word. When you start Outlook up, you don't "load" your email file, and you don't need to save it on exit. Extend this paradigm to Word. You'd still have a "new" command to create a new document, and you could have an unlimited number of named documents, but you never have to "save" them. You could "close" them -- but that would just mean they're not on the screen anymore. Effectively you'd always be editing in place. You no longer have to think about starting and stopping Word. You'd only think about looking at a particular document vs. not looking at a particular document. Note that none of this has to do with the OS's ability or inability to run simultaneous processes.
Also, please don't lecture me about "narrow prisms" when you don't even understand what I'm saying. There are very few systems out there since CTSS that I haven't used or studied.
Re: it's not about "memory management"
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