mQuickDo is far and away my favorite jailbreak app. In fact, it ‘s one of or perhaps the primary reason I ‘m staying jailbroken on the iPhone 3GS right now “ because of its slick app-switching capability.
It ‘s also “ at least in my experience “ extremely temperamental. As in, it often just stops responding as it should, stops doing what it is setup to do.
The app had been mostly working well for me until early last week, when it just stopped responding out of the blue. No new jailbreak apps had been added to the iPhone, and certainly no apps that should have affected mQuickDo – i.e. none that needed to make use of swiping in the bottom bar area below the dock, which is what mQuickDo was set to use. When I say it stopped responding I mean that it was completely unresponsive to my three defined actions for it: long slide right (to go to home screen), short swipe up/down (to invoke app switching display), and press and hold for 3 seconds (to grab a screencap).
At first I thought I was just getting one or more of the actions wrong, or not quite placing my fingers in the right place when doing them. But I tried every which way but loose “ with my thumb as I always had, with my index finger, with 100% concentration on touching just the exact right area. Nothing doing.
I tried switching the placement of mQuickDo to above the status bar and it worked just fine. That is not my preferred position though, so I tried some steps to try to resolve the issue:
- Tried a respring (restart of Springboard) “ no change
- Via Cydia, tried the ‘Reinstall ‘ option on mQuickDo and the restart of Springboard it prompted for when done “ no change
- Tried increasing its height setting for its bottom bar “ no change
- Via Cydia, tried a full ‘Remove ‘ of the app and reinstalled again “ still no change
So I gave up and placed it above the status bar, where it continued to work but also caused some headaches. Firstly, it made SBSettings very difficult to access “ as most times I tried to get the swipe action for SBSettings to work, it instead pulled up mQuickDo. Also, it made it near impossible to tap the status bar on a web page to go straight to the top of the page.
Then all of a sudden after a few days it stopped responding above the status bar and was once again responding down on the bottom bar below the Dock. I double-checked the settings for the app to make sure I hadn ‘t some sort of unconscious episode and flipped the setting back without knowing “ but it was still set be above the status bar, while doing the opposite.
Last night it flipped its wig again “ refusing to respond via the bottom bar and causing me to swap it back to above the status bar.
This level of severely flaky behavior over the course of a week would normally have me thinking seriously about deleting the offending app. In this case I ‘m not there yet. I ‘m cutting this app a lot of slack because when it ‘s working it provides such a super-useful function for me.
It has crossed my mind that a lot of these issues may be caused by the fact that I use a screen protector on my 3GS “ and maybe that ‘s decreased the sensitivity levels in certain areas of the screen. I ‘m by no means convinced that ‘s the issue though “ as I have seen zero sign of that in any other app or area of the OS.
I also really hope that does not turn out to be the cause “ as that would be a dealbreaker for me. As much as I like app switching, I ‘m not willing to risk scratches on the 3GS screen for the sake of one app, no matter how useful. I hope that maybe there will be an update for the app that makes it perform more steadily.
For those of you who use mQuickDo, what are your experiences? Are you seeing any of this sort of flaky behavior?
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TAGS: app switching, mQuickDo
