>>>>>>>I didn't know you could have more than one app displayed on an iPad ?
>>>>
>>>>>>You can on an Android phone too. Just hold down the home key and you switch back and forth for recently opened apps and it will launch more than one if you want and you can switch back and forth via the long press on the home key.
>>>>>
>>>>>But we were discussing having more than one app *on screen* at the same time....
>>>>
>>>>Perhaps they are, just not in the visible area ;-)
>>>
>>>Bit of a fine distinction :-}
>>
>>Not if the other app isn't actually running. (see above)
>
>They are running in the background, not the same as visible of course but when you switch back they are still running where you left them... i don't see how a small screen would support multiple running apps other than perhaps on the desktop and you could slide through the screens like you do now. I never could figure out why be able to slide from left to right just to see more shortcuts or widgets. Allow us to run an app on them and then you could slide left to right etc to switch between the apps.
>
>Still, not my cup of tea for a phone. I may want to run a map locator on one screen and make or receive a phone call or text on another (I know a lot of folks play music and watch videos on theirs), but other than that, I don't use my phone for much more than that other than connecting to my bank account so I can transfer money to daughter - which seems to be a regular occurrence. :)

Okay, just went back and looked. John Sonmez. : app runs in it's own process and then as new apps open they pushed on the stack, where they become the "root process: Android manages memory by priotizing processes and killing least important ones. Activities on stack can belong to processes that are killed, so Android programmer must have a way of maintaining state.

A bit like writing out to HD when open apps in windows can't be entirely contained in memory, but killed a process implies to me that it actually needs to be launched again for the state to be restored. (and Android developer is responsible for maintaining state as opposed to OS )

Anyway, I just remember that this was an issue for "multitasking" and it had to do with more than visibility ( the music apps particularly get marked as do not kill, I think if they are not paused but if they are they can be killed, but they remember where you were. )