Most of my iPhone applications behave quite nicely. But every so often, a little problem will crop up. Not bad enough that the app crashes, but just bad enough for it to get “stuck.”
I happened to me recently with TweetList Pro, my preferred iPhone Twitter app. No matter what I did, it wouldn’t update my Twitter timeline with the latest tweets. Clicking the iPhone home button and returning to the app made no difference. It still wouldn’t refresh the list.
My first solution was to power off — then power on the entire iPhone. Resetting the whole works did indeed fix my little nagging TweetList problem, but the solution seemed like overkill.
On my Mac, I would have handled it differently. It’s very easy to quit a non-responsive application by pressing Opt-Cmd Escape and then “force quitting” any running app in the list.
I discovered that you can do the same thing on an iPhone or iPad. Here’s how:
1. Double-click the iPhone/iPad home button. This reveals the multitasking list of apps you’ve been using at the bottom of the screen. Press and hold one of the icons. All the icons start to jiggle.
2. Find the app that’s giving you problems and touch its little red minus sign. The entire icon will disappear signifying that the app has totally stopped running and is now cleared from memory. Click the iPhone’s home button again to stop the jiggling and return to your home screen.
Finally, restart the app and leave your nagging little problems behind!
I actually do it slightly differently. What I usually do is press and hold the power button until the “slide to shut down” portion appears, then I let go of the power button, press and hold the home button, and after a few seconds, the program is closed and I’m back on the home page. Just another way of doing things. Nice site 🙂
Good tip. Thanks for the feedback, Matt!