Keeping Initiate Fast!

Initiate is designed to be fast. It's also designed to give maximum flexibility to the user.

Some features do make Initiate work particularly hard and can potentially slow down your device. You will need to decide whether the slowdown is noticable to you, and whether the feature is worth it!

This page describes the main features that make Initiate work hard and why.

If you think your device is running slowly, you may want to read this article about how to spot applications in the background that a slowing down. (the Initiate issues below only apply when Initiate is running as the foreground application)

Live Backgrounds:

If you use a JPEG background in preferences/backgrounds, then you have the choice of 'converted' JPEG or (on most devices) 'live JPEG'. The 'live JPEG' option saves memory on the device because the JPEG is only converted from the file on the sd card when it is needed.

This conversion process can take a noticeable amount of time -particularly if the JPEG you use is larger than your screen, or you have an older device. You will notice the delay when you launch Initiate, or when you switch to a view that uses a different background. On my Treo 680, the delay is a fraction of a second (but noticeable).

Using a cached background reduces this delay to approximately zero.

Double Resolution:

If you use the double resolution option in preferences/layout then Initiate has to dynamically create a half size icon for any application which doesn't have a low resolution icon built it. This can have a small slowdown effectwhen you scroll the page, or show new icons due to searching. This is particularly relevant if your page is set up to show a very large number of icons.

Background Updating:

When Initiate first launches, it starts checking applications and contacts in the background to add any new ones your to list or remove any that have been deleted. This means you seldom need to manually update the launch list. It does mean Initiate is doing two things at once when you first launch (though the background update temporarily suspended whenever you tap on the screen or press a key).

If you think that background updating is slowing down your launching, you can experiment with turning it off in the preferences/launching items/miscellaneous settings page.

 

That it is!