[meet ubuntu] welcome tutorial omits switching/closing apps

[Selene ToyKeeper]

The welcome tutorial is a great quickstart for new users, but it omits two important features:
 - How to use the right edge to switch between running apps.
 - How to close apps (swipe left edge across, hold app icon a few seconds, tap the 'X' which appears over it).

Otherwise, the right edge is presented as nothing more than a way to unlock the welcome screen (which isn't a lock screen), and it can be very difficult to figure out how to close apps. Many apps don't have any built-in way to quit, so this standardized method should probably be mentioned. Closing apps, in particular, is not very discoverable as-is.

[Andrea Cimitan (cimi)]

Not sure we want to show how to close apps... closing apps is something that should not be required on mobile devices, and can only make things more complicated (when you close an app, which state is preserved?)

[Selene ToyKeeper (toykeeper)]

Wait... closing apps isn't important on low-resource devices?

Quite a few apps have a "Quit" function which doesn't work, so Unity's app-closing mechanism is the only way to close them. In particular, some apps will hang and cannot function again until they are manually killed and then restarted (the browser, for example, on complex pages).

At least on Android, an easy way to close apps is a very common need, considering that "Advanced Task Killer" has more than 50 million users. My Android phone quickly becomes unusable without it. Ubuntu can mostly do away with the need for this sort of thing, and has the feature already built in... it's just not very easy to discover.

In any case, it would also be nice to mention that the right edge is a nice (and pretty) way to switch between running apps.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for Unity 8 because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Selene ToyKeeper (toykeeper)]

A change recently landed which removed the display of currently-running apps from the app scope. It also removes the little arrow in the launcher indicating whether an app is actually running or simply pinned there for quick access.

So, now the only way to see which apps are running, or to close them, is to use the right edge. Swipe all the way from right to left and it shows a 3D stack of running apps. Tap one to switch to it, or swipe it up or down to close it. I think it's actually a nice UI upgrade, but it makes the right edge even more important than ever.

However, the welcome tutorial suggests that the right edge is only used for dismissing the welcome screen... which isn't actually even true any more. Any left/right swipe, even starting from the middle, will now dismiss the welcome screen. And the welcome screen even has a message stating "Swipe to unlock" if the user touches the screen.

So, it seems the welcome tutorial should probably be updated to reflect the current interface... and the right edge's task-management functions are an important thing to at least mention (though it could be hard to demo, since at that point no apps are running).

[Estibaliz Landa Torres (estilanda)]

Right edge swipe is contemplated in the tutorial design.
Closing apps is not.

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

OK, so design said right edge switching is fine, but closing is not. Latest unity8 in vivid does this. So marking fixed.