Thursday, August 23, 2007
Shutdown Unwanted Applications with AppCloser v0.1
Posted by Pete Paxton in "Smartphone Software" @ 03:00 PM
"AppCloser is a light-weight, free utility for Windows Mobile 5 Smart Phones. Although designed for the HTC s620 and compatible phones, it should run on a variety of devices including Windows Mobile 6 phones. Essentially, every time the user returns to the home screen, the utility closes all programs in a set list to help free up memory. It does this transparently to the user. AppCloser attempts to close an application and if it does not respond, it forcibly terminates it. Once installed (see below), start AppCloser from the file explorer. Then press the home key to return to the home screen. AppCloser is now running on your phone."
AppCloser seems like a great program except for one thing, I can't seem to get it to work. According to their insructions, I'm supposed to put the app in the “Program FilesAppCloser” directory on my Dash. Then theoretically, I can hit my home button and running programs should close. When I check however, they are still open. Of course I've goofed up software before and then a loyal Smartphone Thoughts reader either posts what I'm doing wrong or comes up with some kind of fix. I'm hoping that's the case this time because this seems like a very useful program. You can control which programs are automatically closed by modifying the configuration file “apps.txt” . This file is a simple list of the names of the executable . The list is currently limited to 32 entries. I hope someone out there gets this one working and posts how they did it. Interesting that we need a third party app to close programs. Microsoft, are you listening?
