On Day 2 of running my iPhone 3GS jailbroken I ‘ve come round to thinking about what do I want most out of the jailbreak, and what I ‘m most ‘missing ‘ when running ‘stock ‘. So far, more than anything I am enjoying the ability to switch between apps rapidly.  I ‘m doing so […]
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All I Want for (iPhone) Christmas Is App Switching

Jul 28th 2009 by

mQuickDo

On Day 2 of running my iPhone 3GS jailbroken I ‘ve come round to thinking about what do I want most out of the jailbreak, and what I ‘m most ‘missing ‘ when running ‘stock ‘.

So far, more than anything I am enjoying the ability to switch between apps rapidly.  I ‘m doing so via the mQuickDo application, which has taken some getting used to, but is a superb addition to my iPhone experience.

I ‘m also running the Backgrounder app, which I ‘d heard mentioned an awful lot and which (as the name suggests) lets you run applications in the background. 

What I ‘m finding though is that it ‘s not so much the running in the background that is a great productivity boost for me, but much more the ability to switch quickly between apps.  When I first thought about this, I doubted my own premise a little and thought about how much faster the switching would be “ between say Safari and Evernote (to paste in an interesting block of text from a web article) for example “ if Evernote was ‘backgrounding ‘, left running but minimized.

So I ‘ve done a little bit of testing on this.  Trying out app switching with my favorite 3rd party apps active in the background, and then without that ability enabled (via Backgrounder).  I ‘m finding that apps launch so quickly on the iPhone 3GS that the difference between switching to them when they ‘re backgrounding, and switching to them when they have to launch fresh, is very, very minimal “ almost not even noticeable. 

I ‘ve only tested this out a little with a few favorite apps, and others ‘ mileage may well vary “ but I ‘m not currently seeing a huge benefit in leaving apps open in the background. 

It ‘s the quick-switching that is the huge plus for me “ to jump easily from email to Things to record a new task, or from Safari to Evernote, or over to Twitterrific “ and all of these are super fast and responsive via mQuickDo, even when not running in the background.

I ‘d love to hear your thoughts on this one.  How important are app-switching and background running to you?  Which is the biggest help to you when running jailbroken?

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