Favorite Development settings and what they do.

[Johnly]

I just started messing around with the developer settings on thr nexus. The CPU usage overlay is cool. Wonder what else we can do from there?

 

[Johnly]

Has anyone tweaked the windows animation scale? I did by x1. Neat!

 

[DolfanCole]

Didn't even go looking at the settings until I saw this thread. Trying out some of the options now. One I'm curious on is the force GPU rendering. I would have thought that this would have been "on" by default. Also trying the "Show touches". Seems neat, until I probably get tired of it.

 

[Johnly]

Good point. Noticed there is a setting for destroying activities on closing them. I may try that for a few days and see. That force gpu setting, huh? Cool!

 

[DolfanCole]

Good point. Noticed there is a setting for destroying activities on closing them. I may try that for a few days and see. That force gpu setting, huh? Cool!

Yeah, gonna try that too and see what happens. I've caught myself many, many times going to the app switcher and swiping apps to close them. Just not sure of the best way to close the app, while still being able to switch/multitask.

 

[Johnly]

Yeah, gonna try that too and see what happens. I've caught myself many, many times going to the app switcher and swiping apps to close them. Just not sure of the best way to close the app, while still being able to switch/multitask.

I was thinking that too. I do like multitasking on this thing, and when i need a few apps open, it hauls major ssa betweent tasks. I know the iPhone freezez/kills processes and that helpls attrubute to a good battery life. Native task killer by google, guess that argument is null?

 

[JoeUserTX]

Yeah, gonna try that too and see what happens. I've caught myself many, many times going to the app switcher and swiping apps to close them. Just not sure of the best way to close the app, while still being able to switch/multitask.

I selected that feature a while back, but it really doesn't appear to be completely killing the apps (they're still available when looking at the task switcher). Not really sure if that feature is actually enabled (but, I may be confused to its purpose, too)...

 

[TrendyProfessional1]

Good point. Noticed there is a setting for destroying activities on closing them. I may try that for a few days and see. That force gpu setting, huh? Cool!

What does that supposedly do?
This is one area of settings that looks to be an advantage.

 

[alterbridge86]

What does that supposedly do?
This is one area of settings that looks to be an advantage.

Starting in Honeycomb, Google opened up the ability to hw accelerate 2d drawing within apps. App developers had to add a flag to their manifest however in order to take advantage of this. As a result, most apps performed just as they did on GB, while the few that were updated to take advantage of 2d acceleration performed better.

In ICS, Google has changed this so that any app that targets a honeycomb or higher api level automatically has 2d drawing accelerated, however older apps that haven't been updated still will not be. By selecting "force gpu rendering" option, it makes ALL apps, regardless of API or flags in manifest, render with the hardware.

This is not set as the default option because there is the possibility that apps will render incorrectly or just flat out crash since they were not designed to be rendered with the hardware. However, since getting my Nexus on thursday i've been running with that option checked and haven't had any issues.