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One of the most useful features of S60 is Multitasking. We all know you have to long-press the Menu/Home key to see a list of currently running applications. Unfortunately, this is somewhat of a waste of a key, and there are various softwares out in the market to enhance the functionality of this key. The 2 most widely used ones are
1) Handy Taskman
2) Jbak Taskman
Handy Taskman is generally viewed as the better looking one, but seems to have less features when compared to the brilliance that is Jbak Taskman.
Here are some of the features that make JBak Taskman the most used application on my phone.
1)Type and Find Your Applications.
This feature is extremely extremely useful, and has become second nature to me. You just have to long press the Menu/Home key, and then press the # key. After that simply type the name of the application you want. No more navigating through menus.
2)The Task List
On long pressing the Menu/Home key, a screen choc full of information pops up. On the top, it shows free RAM, and the memory status of your C and E Drive. Below that the screen is neatly divided into 2 columns. One shows the currently running applications, and the other shows the Quick Launch list. Below that are the Date and Time, down to number of seconds. Compared the what normally pops up when you long press the menu/home key, this is a major improvement.
You can also set custom rules for each program using Program Rules.
Eg.- Auto Start a program each time you switch the phone on.
3)Customizable Quick Launch
The Quick Launch is another feature that makes you want to forget of ever navigating the menus.
You can set as many shortcuts as you want, but the first 9 will be accessible by just pressing the corresponding number key. A variety of tasks can be used in the quick launch.
Out of these, the ones i find most useful are :
Application and Document – This doesn’t force us to use the default document viewer and using a 3rd party application is possible.
URL – You can keep your most visited websites on your Quick Launch menu! Note that the Quick Launch shortcuts are INSTANTLY accessible from wherever you are in the phone.
SMS – Another really handy option to have.
The developers have thought and thought of virtually everything we might want to do and crammed it into this brilliant freeware.
Note that for quick access to Themes, this is very useful since normally you have to navigate atleast 4-5 screens to reach Themes in the menu system.
4) The Sheer Number of Settings
As geeks, we all love fiddling with Settings. Its disappointing when we run out of settings to fiddle with. For example, the Real Player Application on our phones. No useful setting. Jbak Taskman has various settings.
The first thing i change is the Menu key’s settings. What normal happens when you just press the Menu key, is that the Menu pops up. You can do this wherever you are in the phone. I feel it would be more useful to jump directly to your homescreen on pressing the Menu key. We used to be able to do this on old S60V2 phones, but from V3, the Red/End key terminates the current application. JBak Taskman lets you jump to the homescreen on pressing the Menu key. There is also an option for ‘Long Press’, and ‘Very Long Press’.
5)Quick Termination Of Tasks
Previously, if an application hung up, we would minimize it, long press the menu key, and try to exit it by continually pressing the ‘c’ key. Here, Jbak Taskman KILLS the application when you press the ‘c’ key, hence instantly terminating the process. Its somewhat like clicking the close botton on you computer, compared to pressing ctrl alt delete, going to processes, and ending the program. If you fiddle around with beta software from time to time, there are bound to be hang ups, and terminating the program becomes invaluable
6)Its Stable
I tried overloading my phone, by running all the applications i could think of, to see if JBak Taskman would cave in and exit. It didn’t, and stayed on even though my RAM was nearly full.
Note that on my phone, there is 120 MB of RAM, so bringing it down to 2-3MB is quite an achievement. My commiserations to those using RAM deficient phones like the N73.
7) Its Free!
Everyone loves freeware. You can download JBak Taskman from their official website by clicking here.
What task manager do you use? Do you prefer the default one or have you found another gem of an application like JBak Taskman? Do let us know !
- Aatif Sumar
Comments (4)
Something you forgot to mention is the ability to smooth scroll through your opened apps by continuously holding the menu key. That is, if you enable this option. I find this very useful when switching between two applications that I am currently using. Though at default, the switching is fairly slow. However, you can tweak the timing in the settings to speed things up to your liking.
i never tried switching using the menu key, but that sounds really useful!
i never tried switching using the menu key, but that sounds really useful!