Computing Archives - Page 7 of 11

iBought a new iPhone

December 23, 2024September 25, 2012 by Neil Turner

So my new iPhone 5 has finally come. It’s not quite the model I was intending – I had ordered a black 16 GB model, but an order mix-up with 3 meant that I didn’t receive it as planned on Friday and after talking with a very nice person at customer services I ended up with a white 64 GB model, at no extra cost. I’d have preferred a black one, but I can’t argue with getting four times the space for the same price. I’ve saved in the region of £150 as a result.

Because I backed up my iPhone 4 to iCloud, when it came to setting up my iPhone 5 I just needed to connect to wi-fi, give it my iCloud login and tell it to restore from the cloud backup. This meant that all of my settings and apps would be automatically installed, just as they were on the old handset, which saved a huge amount of time getting the phone set up. It wasn’t totally smooth – stored passwords didn’t seem to copy, for example, and some apps like Pocket needed re-installing – but much better than starting from scratch. In particular, my progress on games such as Angry Birds was carried over, to my relief. Many of the apps I use regularly, like the aforementioned Tweetbot and Pocket, have been updated for the new larger display, but older apps do work okay. Apple did a good job of implementing the letterbox mode for these.

Physically the new phone is much nicer to hold – it’s noticeably lighter and thinner, and the edges don’t feel as sharp as they do on the iPhone 4. You can still use it easily with one hand too, unlike the wider screens on some Android phones which require you to change hands to reach far off corners of the display. The new Lightning connector is nice, although I’m a little less happy at the prospect of forking out £15 for an extra cable; plus, with 2 iPods and an iPhone 4 in our household we’ve no shortage of the old cables. I’ll also need to look into buying a case for the iPhone 5, as Apple haven’t released any bumpers for this model like they did for the 4 and 4S, nor do they sell any third party cases in Apple Stores, as Dave found out.

The new phone is much more responsive than my old one – apps work faster, especially Foursquare and Tweetbot. Support for HSPA+ also makes web pages download more quickly, and provides a small speed jump ahead of 3 rolling out 4G LTE services next year.

I’ve also had a play with Siri – I’m quite impressed that it understands almost everything I say (I have a northern accent) although it can’t always find data. I asked it about a local rugby league team, Bradford Bulls, and it interpreted it as the Chicago Bulls. For information about local places it uses Yelp, which is rather rubbish in the UK – searching for a nearby Nando’s found one in Leeds but not the two in Bradford which were much closer to me at the time.

All in all, I’m really impressed. Whilst it’s definitely an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary device, it’s a clear improvement over the iPhone 4.

First Thunderbird, now Sparrow…

December 23, 2024July 20, 2012 by Neil Turner

I’m not having a good time with email clients. Earlier this month we learned that Thunderbird would not get any major feature updates in future (development will continue but Mozilla has reduced Thunderbird’s resources). And now Sparrow, my favoured email client on Mac OS X and on my iPhone, has been acquired by Google.

This may not sound like bad news but, alas, this is a ‘talent acquisition’ – a bit like when Facebook bought Gowalla last year. In other words, the people behind Sparrow will be working on new projects at Google, specifically on the Gmail teams, and won’t be doing any further work on Sparrow itself – this was confirmed by a Google spokesperson to Macstories. We can expect ongoing support for Sparrow, but no new features.

The Mac OS X version is reasonably complete in terms of features – in fact, it has just been updated for the new Retina displays in Apple’s latest MacBook Pro, and presumably will work with Mountain Lion without any problems. As for the iOS version, it can do almost everything that the stock email client for the iPhone can do (and more), but with the notable exception of push notifications of new email messages. This was likely to be a premium feature due to how push notifications work on iOS with background apps. Presumably, today’s announcement means that this won’t be forthcoming; similarly, a rumoured iPad app is now unlikely to be released.

Whilst I’m happy for Sparrow’s developers to be recognised for their talent, and presumably Google were able to give them an offer that they could not refuse, this potentially leaves Sparrow’s users in the lurch. Of course, there’s a limit to what you can do with what was always intended to be a simple email client – part of the reason for the slowdown of Thunderbird development – but the iOS client in particular showed a lot of promise that now won’t be realised.

The likelihood of Sparrow finding a new home in Google was slim in any case; Google doesn’t tend to do much in the way of desktop software (Chrome, Drive, Earth and Picasa are the only major exceptions) and there’s already an official Gmail app for iOS, which has been updated recently and, crucially, supports push notifications. And keeping Sparrow going at Google whilst its developers focus on other things would have been a distraction.

I hope that, instead, Sparrow offer to sell the branding rights and source code to somebody else, to keep it going. Or, better yet, make it open source, so that the community can keep it going. On iOS, the jailbreak community have already written various enhancements, such as Sparrow+.

I suppose I’ll have to investigate Apple’s own Mail app in Mountain Lion. I tried to use it recently as an alternative to Thunderbird, but in Lion it feels over-complicated and poorly designed.

Addendum: There’s an interesting post from Elezea which I also agree with.

The technical superiority of Dropbox

December 23, 2024April 29, 2012 by Neil Turner

Although I’ve made a few edits to my SkyDrive vs Dropbox vs Google Drive blog post from last week, I haven’t gone into much detail about some of the more technical aspects of the services. Dropbox, being the more mature of the three, has some clever tricks up its sleeves which Google Drive doesn’t have, and SkyDrive also appears to lack too.

LAN sync

LAN sync is a DropBox feature that will share files between computers on the same network. If you have Dropbox open and signed in to the same account on two computers on the same network, and save a file into your Dropbox folder on one computer, then as well as uploading that file to Dropbox’s servers, that computer will also send the file to your other computer over the network. This is much quicker than the other computer waiting for the file to be uploaded to Dropbox’s servers to download it again, and saves on your bandwidth. Google Drive doesn’t have LAN sync, and I don’t think SkyDrive does either.

Sadly, LAN sync only works between desktop computers; if you save a file on your iPhone, it won’t appear on your desktop until your desktop has downloaded it from Dropbox’s servers, even if you have Wifi enabled on your iPhone.

Delta syncing

If you edit a file that’s already in your Dropbox, Dropbox will detect which bits of the files have changed, and then only upload those changes. Google Drive isn’t quite so intelligent and will just upload the whole file again. So if you have a 750 MB high definition video in your Dropbox, and change some of the metadata in the file’s header, Dropbox may only need to upload a few kilobytes (and other computers on your Dropbox account will only need to download those few kilobytes too). Google Drive will instead upload the whole 750 MB file again. Coupled with the lack of LAN sync, as mentioned above, that’s a lot of bandwidth being used unnecessarily.

Duplicate file detection

If you put two identical copies of a file in your Dropbox folder, Dropbox will detect that they’re the same and just upload one copy, but make sure that both copies are on its servers (note that both copies will count towards your total storage space). Google Drive will still upload both files regardless of the fact that they contain the exact same data.

Resurrecting deleted files

Dropbox keeps a file history going back 30 days, meaning you can recover deleted files and also revert to older versions of existing files. Google Drive doesn’t appear to let you revert file versions but deleted items go in a trash folder. But Dropbox is also clever about deleted files. Say you have a file in your Dropbox folder, which you then drag to the Recycle Bin; Dropbox will delete the file, but let you recover it on the web if you wish; but also, if you undelete that file on your desktop and put it back into your Dropbox, Dropbox will detect that the file was already on its servers and just make the file live again – it won’t need to upload it again.

Memory efficient desktop client

Client name	32/64-bit	Idle CPU Usage	Real memory usage	Virtual memory usage
Dropbox	32-bit	0 %	41.7 MB	56.6 MB
Google Drive	32-bit	1.5 %	61.7 MB	64.6 MB
SkyDrive	64-bit	0.3 %	17.1 MB	22.5 MB

I ran all three clients at the same time and compared their performance using Mac OS X’s Activity Monitor. SkyDrive is arguably the clear winner here – although it uses a little more CPU than Dropbox, its memory usage is tiny, and it’s the only one of the three to take advantage of OS X’s code operations for 64-bit applications. Google Drive is a hog by comparison, using almost 3 times more memory than SkyDrive and much more CPU – and this is whilst idle, i.e. not syncing files. Furthermore, this is despite not having the advanced features that Dropbox has.

Obviously Google Drive is new and it’s likely that future releases will reach closer feature parity with Dropbox, but right now, Dropbox is technically superior than Google Drive, thus working faster and saving your bandwidth. I haven’t looked into SkyDrive as much as I possibly should have and will revisit this post when I have more information.

Much of the information for this article is sourced from this post on Dropbox’s foums.

Distracted by a Pictionary clone

December 23, 2024March 23, 2012 by Neil Turner

A screenshot of the game Draw Something. The drawing is a crude depiction of a king on a throne and the word is 'throne'.

So I would have blogged more this week, but I’ve been spending my time playing Draw Something. I’m sure the novelty will wear off, and I sort-of agree with TechCrunch’s analysis – i.e. it sucks – but right now it’s rather addictive. The use of push notifications is a stroke of genius.

We probably all know by now that the game’s creators, OMGPOP, have just been bought out by Zynga, creators of FarmVille, for millions of dollars. Which would have probably been unthinkable merely a few weeks ago, when the game was only playable online and maybe only had a few thousand players. Then it launched on iPhone and Android, and suddenly millions of people have downloaded it. It’s currently the biggest-selling paid-for app on Apple’s App Store, especially now that it’s available for 99 cents (69p) for a limited time.

SkyDrive vs Dropbox

December 23, 2024December 18, 2011 by Neil Turner

Update (April 2012): I have since written a new article comparing SkyDrive, Dropbox and Google Drive which is more up to date. You are best reading that guide, rather than this one, as some of the information about SkyDrive mentioned below is now wrong, although I’m keeping it here for reference.

If you’re like me, you’ll have a free Dropbox account for keeping files in sync between multiple computers, as well as having documents available on demand wherever there’s an internet connection, or on your mobile phone. Here’s my referral link. It’s a good, simple service that works well, and it’s free – although you can pay for more storage.

Microsoft has been working on a competitor called Windows Live SkyDrive which also offers integration with its Office Live suite of web apps. There’s now also an iPhone app (and presumably a Windows Phone app as well). Plus, with up to 25 GB of free storage, it starts to compare quite favourably with Dropbox. So, which is best?

Storage space

On the face of it, SkyDrive wins – 25 GB versus 2 GB for a plain vanilla free Dropbox account. However, it’s quite easy to get more space on Dropbox – you should be able to manage at least another 1 GB for free, and with a bit of effort even more – some have even taken to buying AdWords campaigns for around $20 to get up to 16 GB. And whereas Dropbox lets you use all of your space for anything, with SkyDrive, you can only use up to 5 GB to synchronise between computers using its Live Mesh service (more on that later). The other 20 GB has to be used via web uploads, iPhone app, Microsoft Office or Office Live. On this basis, it’s a draw.

Platform support

Dropbox has official clients for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, plus mobile clients for the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. Its open API means that unofficial clients are available for further platforms as well. SkyDrive is available on Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Mac OS X Lion – i.e. not available for Windows XP or Linux; alternatively you can access specific documents in Microsoft Office, on the web or on a mobile app. And as yet, SkyDrive doesn’t work on Android or any Linux desktops, nor is there an open API for third-party developers to use.

Simplicity

Dropbox’s main draw is simplicity – there’s one folder that gets synced on all of your computers, and you can also access this folder online or on a mobile app. As mentioned, with SkyDrive you can only sync up to 5 GB; furthermore, those synced folders then cannot be edited by Office Live apps, so it’s a bit more complex. Plus there’s the whole confusion between the SkyDrive and Mesh products.

I could go on, but frankly having reviewed both services Dropbox wins purely by being simple and ubiquitous. SkyDrive does give you more space for free, and also integrates well with Hotmail if you use it, but it also adds a layer of complexity by only letting you use a portion of your allowance for syncing files between desktops. And because the un-synced portion doesn’t mount as a folder on your desktop, you can’t save files to it directly, so really it’s only useful for more long-term storage, or files that aren’t edited frequently. I’ll therefore be sticking with Dropbox.

The state of MacFUSE & NTFS-3G on OS X Lion

July 30, 2024August 2, 2011 by Neil Turner

So I’ve been running Mac OS X Lion (10.7) for a week now, and it’s mostly been fine – most programs run okay and others have had minor updates to improve compatibility. However, there’s some flakiness with MacFUSE and in particular the NTFS-3G package which allows read-write access to hard drives formatted with the NTFS file system.

(If you’re short of time, scroll down to the ‘So what are the options’ section.)

Firstly, a bit of MacFUSE history…

MacFUSE was a project to allow file system packages designed for the Linux FUSE project, which in turn allowed file systems to be loaded in ‘user space’ rather than requiring extensions to the operating system kernel, to be run on Mac OS X. This meant that FUSE did all of the kernel work, thus much simplifying the development of file systems. MacFUSE wasn’t a port of FUSE – it’s a separate project that happens to be compatible with existing FUSE file system packages. It was also developed by a Google employee in his 20% time, i.e. the time that Google allows engineers to set aside for their own projects.

Now, the latest official release of MacFUSE was version 2.0.3,2 which is 32-bit and designed for Leopard, i.e. Mac OS X 10.5. We’re now on Lion, and there hasn’t been a subsequent official release even for Snow Leopard, nevermind Lion. Version 2.0.3,2 ran okay on Snow Leopard provided you used the default 32-bit kernel, but in Lion, the kernel task is 64-bit.

Thankfully, some other developers have picked up the baton – in particular Tuxera, who offer a commercial solution for running NTFS on a Mac. It seems to work fine on Lion, even with a 64-bit kernel. Alternatively, there’s a fork called OSXFUSE, which is in beta at time of writing, although if you want to use OSXFUSE you will need to remove MacFUSE first.

NTFS support

Lion, like other versions of Mac OS X that have come before it, supports read-only access to NTFS disks when a product like MacFUSE isn’t installed. This means that you can read files from an NTFS-formatted disk, but you can’t modify or delete existing files or copy new ones to it. It’s a shame that Apple still hasn’t unveiled official read/write support for NTFS after all these years.

Currently, the only free software I’m aware of for enabling read/write access to NTFS drives is NTFS-3G. The most recent binary release is from October 2010, and whilst this does work on Lion, even with MacFUSE 2.2 you will encounter errors when mounting the disk – namely that it’s taken more than 15 seconds to do so. However, once it is mounted, it seems to work okay, although admittedly I’ve only been working with a seldom-used external drive and not a drive where I expect strong read/write performance.

If you fancy compiling code from source, or have MacPorts, you can get a newer version released in April 2011 which may or may not work better – I haven’t tried it yet.

So what are the options?

There are basically four options you can choose, if you use NTFS drives on your Mac:

Don’t upgrade to Lion just yet. If everything works fine now, you may wish to stay with Snow Leopard until there’s a new binary release of NTFS-3G. Lion is still very new and there aren’t many third-party applications taking advantage of its new features as yet.
Use NTFS-3G and MacFUSE 2.2 as before. In my experience it works, but you do get an error each time your disk is mounted (which could be on every boot up for some) and it is slow at mounting the disk. If you’re reliant on an NTFS drive you may not want to try this just in case things aren’t working properly and you lose data.
Buy Tuxera NTFS for Mac. If you are reliant on an NTFS drive on your Mac, you may want the piece of mind of a commercial, supported product, in which case you can buy Tuxera NTFS for Mac which states that it is Lion-compatible.
Use exFAT instead of NTFS. If you need the drive to be usable on both Windows and Mac, don’t need file system level encryption or compression and are willing to copy all of your data off it, reformat it, and copy the data back, then maybe you’d be better with the exFAT file system. It’s the successor to FAT32, and supports disk and file sizes of over 500 terabytes. It’s also quite well-supported – Mac OS X received support for it in the 10.6.5 update to Snow Leopard, Windows XP supports it with the KB955704 up date and Service Pack 2, Windows Vista with Service Pack 1 and Windows 7 supports it out of the box. You will have issues with Linux machines, however, in which case FAT32 is also an option.

I personally have gone for the fourth option for my external drive; the Disk Utility in Lion lets you format drives as exFAT and I don’t need any of the advanced features of NTFS. But another of these options may be best for you.

Mac OS X Lion – first impressions

December 23, 2024July 25, 2011 by Neil Turner

A screenshot of Preferences in Mac OS X Lion

I made the plunge and installed Mac OS X Lion last night. The install takes a little under an hour all in all, including 2 reboots. During the second phase, i.e. between the two reboots, you can pop open a log file viewer which shows you what it’s actually doing, of which at least 10 minutes is spent running an fsck check on your disk and then creating the recovery partition, which you can use in case your Mac won’t boot properly. (In the past, you would have used the install DVD for Mac OS X, but as Lion is a digital download you won’t have this option anymore).

Anyhow, the install went okay, so here are my first impressions:

Natural Scrolling – I immediately turned off ‘natural’ scrolling, because it felt like anything but natural. I suppose I could have tried to get used to it, but I use a Windows machine at work which has a scrollwheel that works the ‘classic’ way and would rather have consistency. It’s bad enough having to cope with two different keyboard layouts. Natural scrolling is fine on touchscreen devices like the iPhone but I just don’t think it works with a mouse and separate screen.
Scrollbars – I’m very much against Apple’s decision to hide scrollbars by default, and only show them once you already start scrolling – how do you know whether to scroll something if there are no scrollbars? So I’ve told Lion to always show them. On the other hand, I do like the new minimalist look of the scrollbars.
New theme – Lion brings a lighter and more understated look to its windows than Snow Leopard. I like it on the whole, barring the lack of colour in some places and the very light colouring of the new title bars. I’ll probably get used to it though.
Mission Control – liking this so far – really improves on Exposé, and still very quick.
Launchpad – a good feature, but poorly implemented. When you install Lion, it enumerates all of the applications in your /Applications/ folder and subfolders, and then adds them all, putting the apps that came with OS X on the first page. Problem is that it includes all of your applications, including uninstallers, patches for World of Warcraft and other stuff that just doesn’t need to be there, and, as I mentioned, Apple’s own apps are on the first page regardless of whether you’ve used them or not (which in the case of iDVD, iMovie, Garageband etc., is never). What’s worse is most apps cannot be deleted from Launchpad unless you downloaded them from the Mac App Store, and for most long-term Mac users this isn’t the case. I hope an update will allow you to remove any kind of app and have more intelligent sorting, based on actual use, when Lion is installed over an existing installation – I’d consider these to be quite major bugs. As it was, I had to spend quite a bit of time moving things around to suit me, although now that I’ve done that it works well as a way of accessing programs that aren’t important enough for the Dock but still need to be within easy reach.
Mac App Store – I found the App Store application to be a bit slow and unresponsive in Snow Leopard; unfortunately this hasn’t been fixed in Lion. Frequently when I click on one of the 5 tabs at the top, it does nothing but show the spinning beach ball of doom for a few seconds. Some visual feedback registering my click, and a change of the content pane to ‘Loading’ would feel much better. Also, if the App Store is now the preferred way of installing new applications, then Apple need to do more to help developers grandfather their existing users into it – i.e. if you’ve bought a program before the App Store, then you should be allowed to have a special code to switch to the App Store version without paying for it again, for example. This would be especially useful for programs like Adobe PhotoShop Elements for which I have the retail copy and don’t want to spend another £55 on the App Store version.
Full screen apps – not had much chance to use this as only Apple’s own apps support it right now. Where I have used it, it seems to work okay but is a little slow due to the animations – or at least it is on my 2009-era Mac Mini. Faster animations, like with Mission Control, would have been better. Getting out of full-screen is also a little unintuitive as you have to hold your mouse at the top of the screen to show the menu bar – Apple would have been better having the close button in the same place on the window itself.
Apple Mail – since this got some love in this update, I decided to give it a try and see how it stacked up to Thunderbird. I wasn’t really impressed – it’s a bit ugly now that Apple have removed all the colour from it, and the fonts didn’t seem to render very well in the mail listing pane. Although it started up quickly, I found it slow when working with multiple IMAP accounts in comparison to Thunderbird.
New voices – You can now download several extra voices for the text-to-speech feature. I downloaded ‘Serena’, a British English voice that sounds like a Radio 4 newsreader. It’s a big improvement on the existing voices, sounding more natural and less robotic than ‘Alex’ which was the voice added in Leopard, although it’s not quite perfect yet. New voice packs are a 200+ MB download though.
iTunes – just a note that if you installed iTunes 10.4 before installing Lion, you’ll need to do so again as Lion will revert it back to 10.3 for you, and it’ll throw back an error when you try to launch it saying that your library is for a newer version. Again, hopefully a 10.7.1 will correct this.
Software issues – only major software issue I’ve encountered is with NTFS-3G, which allows read/write access to NTFS volumes using MacFUSE. MacFUSE itself needs an obscure beta version to work, but even then NTFS-3G will sometimes pop up an error when mounting an NTFS volume. However, in my limited testing it was still able to write to NTFS volumes. There’s also some niggles with Dropbox – it works okay but some smaller features are missing. A beta update is available.
Bigger desktop icons – something I noticed was that icons that appear on the desktop are larger than before. I think I preferred them smaller.
Performance – I haven’t noticed any real differences in performance, bar some initial sluggishness whilst Spotlight rebuilds its database which may take an hour or two after installation is complete. Previous OS X updates have brought minor speed improvements, the lack of perfomance improvements in Lion is therefore a bit of a shame.
Resume, Autosave and Versions – none of the apps I use support this yet, so I haven’t tried it. However, NeoOffice will support these features in a beta version due out next month.

On the whole? I’m slightly underwhelmed as I can only see myself regularly using a few of the new features. There are also a few niggles that Apple should sort out, as well as some bizarre and unintuitive user interface changes. In Lion, Apple’s direction was to let the computer get out of the way of the user, yet the ‘bugs’ in Launchpad, natural scrolling, no scrollbars by default and my issues with full screen applications actually get in the way of the user, in my opinion. But, it’s early days, and this is a .0 release. Allegedly 10.7.2 is already available to developers so 10.7.1 must be on the way soon and will hopefully alleviate some of these issues. My advice would be to wait a bit.

Brain transplant

December 22, 2024March 23, 2011 by Neil Turner

Christine’s laptop has been a bit poorly lately. Before Christmas, it wouldn’t boot up – the ‘Starting Windows’ graphic would show and then it’d stop at BSOD with ‘Unmountable Boot Volume’ as the error. I was able to fix it by starting the computer in Windows Recovery Mode, opening a Command Prompt and using CHKDSK to sort out errors on the hard drive. That did the trick.

But this happened again last week. I did the same thing, but this time CHKDSK found a whole host of bad sectors. While Windows would then boot up afterwards, it was rather slow, and a white flag appeared in the bottom left of the screen, telling me that Windows was having problems with the disk. Not good.

Rather than risk any further disk problems, and Christine losing all of her files, I bought a new hard disk to replace the old one. I took the old disk out (thankfully not too difficult a task with her laptop – an Acer), and put the new disk in, then put the old disk in a USB enclosure. Next, I downloaded CloneZilla and burnt it to a blank CD, then booted the computer up using the CD and had it clone the old drive onto the new drive. I had to run it in ‘–rescue’ mode, as when I tried it with the default settings it failed when it hit the bad sectors. Copying the data took around 6 hours, as this was a 640 GB hard drive.

Thankfully, it was a success, and the computer now boots up and runs fine. The new disk is a 5400rpm 640 GB Samsung drive, which is of the same specification as the old disk – a Western Digital Scorpio Blue (which apparently isn’t very good). I did look at a 7200rpm drive, but would have needed to wait longer for it to be delivered – this drive was available immediately.

Having suffered from a major disk failure back in October 2004 (when some irreplaceable data was lost forever), I’m keen not to replicate the experience in a hurry.

What the cool kids are using

December 22, 2024February 22, 2011 by Neil Turner

I don’t mention my job here much, mostly because the majority of the work that I do deals with confidential information about students and applicants. But today, for a change, I spent some time invigilating a group practical assessment for some of the science students, and the majority of students had brought their laptops with them (it’s ‘open book’, so they can use textbooks and the internet).

Whilst making sure that none of the students were cheating, it was also a chance to see what laptops and web browsers they were using.

Most students had normal sized laptops, but around a quarter had the smaller netbooks. The vast majority were running Windows Vista or 7. Three or four (around 5%) were Macs. There were also a couple of iPads, plus various students using the internet on their smartphones.

As for web browsers, Internet Explorer stuck out as the most popular, though at least everyone was using version 7 or later. Interestingly, Google Chrome was the second most popular, with a surprisingly high number – probably 15-20% of people. Remember, these students were studying science, but not computer science. Firefox was in third place, and I saw one Opera user too. Almost everyone had multiple tabs open; some had 5 or 6.

If this is a typical sample, then it may be that I’m underestimating how popular Google Chrome has become. It’s still quite new on the scene but its growth has been huge.

(Usual disclaimer: this does not necessarily represent the views of my employer, this data was not gathered using scientific methods etc.)

How to: Restart frozen iOS apps

December 22, 2024January 15, 2011 by Neil Turner

OS devices, such as my iPhone 4, are pretty good at handling apps that crash – the app is closed and you’re returned to the home screen (the app may detect that it crashed when you relaunch it and ask for a bug report to be sent). But sometimes apps just freeze, or stop working correctly. They’re still running, but perhaps stuck in an infinite loop. Sadly, this has happened to me recently with apps like the official Twitter and Facebook apps.

With the advent of multitasking on the iPhone 3GS, 4 and 4-and-a-bit (the Verizon iPhone), apps don’t always close when you exit them – often they stay running in the background. So simply closing the app and then opening it again may not be enough to fix the problem.

Previously I’ve taken this further, and simply turned the whole phone on and off again. It works, but it’s a bit like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut – so I set about finding a more elegant solution. And tcgeeks has one.

If an app misbehaves, double-click the Home button. This will bring the multi-tasking bar up along the bottom of your screen. Swipe left or right until you find the naughty app. Touch and hold your finger on it, until all of the app icons start bouncing around. Each icon will now gain a red minus sign – click the minus sign, and iOS will kill the app. Press the Home screen once you’re done. You’ll then be able to launch the app fresh.

This trick can also be used to kill apps that you don’t want to run in the background – a bit like the multitude of ‘Task Killer’ apps that exist on Android. You don’t want to kill them all, as some will need to be running for push notifications for example, but any that are seldom used can probably be safely killed to free up some RAM, and potentially improve your handset’s battery life.