4 ms·
How the heck do I close a Metro application? Do I even? Am I not really supposed to? Is this a computer or a phone-like thing? This is a Surface Pro; am I a pro
by shin_lao 14y ago
How the heck do I close a Metro application? Do I even? Am I not really supposed to? Is this a computer or a phone-like thing? This is a Surface Pro; am I a professional or not? Do professionals close applications? Professional! (Turns out I just mash function-alt-F4, which seems to do the trick, if a little clumsily.)
Just slide the screen with a finger from top to bottom to close an application.
- Ergomane 14y agoWhile you certainly can close Metro apps manually, there's no direct need in terms of resources to do so. Metro apps will be suspended when not on the foreground and removed from memory when free memory gets tight. When switching back, the app is resurrected from the grave. Such Jesus apps do depend on the developer not being lazy / retard. While MS checks apps during the winstore certification process, sometimes apps slip through that do not react to such events correctly. Using those apps is pretty annoying.
- seanmcdirmid 14y agoI often need to force restart metro apps gone wild, and I do so in the task manager (didn't know about the finger trick). These are first party apps like Mail also (to be fair, I have to do this in iOS also, no app is perfect!).
- brudgers 14y agoIf you have two monitors, you can toss the whole Metro interface from one to the other under Windows 8. It's efficient and effective.
- seanmcdirmid 14y agoI don't use metro much on my desktop, just laptop and surface RT unit. The network sucks here in china, and most metro apps don't deal with it very well.
- asveikau 14y agoSure, it's the developer being a retard. Not WinRT's fault for a model which pushes more complexity onto the apps than more straightforward multitasking would, in addition to the behaviors being difficult to test and discover.
- DeepDuh 14y agoI tried that on a laptop touch pad. Didn't work.
- bhauer 14y agoThanks, shin_lao! I got a tweet about this too. Holy cow, that was not intuitive. I tried swiping from the top, but the context menu at the bottom appeared. Apparently, not a long-enough swipe from the top. So I discovered the "sort of task list" you get by swiping rightward from the left and then back to the left. I tried then dragging the thumbnails up, down, left, right. Nothing. I figured eventually I'd take the time to search for a how-to, but what I was doing was just a stream-of-consciousness.
- gamblor956 14y agoHow did you avoid the 15 minute tutorial which launches up when you start Windows 8 and teaches you all of these things?
- bhauer 14y agoHuh. I saw no such tutorial on either my desktop or the Surface. The Surface just gave me a "swipe up to get started" animation and that was that. I was at the Start menu. So I guess I avoided it by not seeing it at all. Once you know it--the close swipe--it seems obvious enough. But just randomly swiping this way and that, I didn't stumble upon the long-swipe-from-top, which is not to be confused with the short-swipe-from-top which opens the context menu at the bottom of the screen.