ios 4 question - multitasking issues

i've been playing with the multitasking feature and it's pretty cool, but there's one aspect of it that drives me crazy: there doesn't appear to be a way to quickly close applications. On my mac I can simply hit "command Q" to close a program, but on the iPhone it appears that I have to first go home, then press the home button twice, hold my finger down on the app I want to close, hit the little red minus sign, and finally hit the home button again to get out of jiggly mode.

Is there a way I can simply close an application without having to go through all that? It'd be nice if there was a certain way you could press the home button to close the visible app.

moved to correct forum.

Whoops...sorry! Don't know how I missd this forum!

Bump...anybody know?

I also ran into another problem stemming from the accidental leaving on of apps. Yesterday I used Navigon to get home from a friend's lake house. Once I got to familiar roads I hit the home button to turn off Navigon.

Well...I forgot that it now continues to run in the background. By the time I got home an hour later the battery was dead.

There is no quicker way to close apps currently.

The way Apple has designed multitasking is quite clever really in that you never really *need* to completely close the apps. They will quite happily live in the multitasking panel indefinitely and not consume any power and minimal memory by design.

Apple have designed it this way so to *almost* represent two functions in one kind of like the dock in OS X. The apps you've most recently used are pushed to the left of the multitasking pane and are in a active state those apps revert to a suspended state either after a set amount of time predetermined by the app developer or when else when the OS deems it necessary to suspend them.
Following that, apps will eventually disappear off the multitasking pane all by themselves when iOS4 decides that it needs the extra bit of memory that the suspended apps are taking up and it will close apps in reverse chronological order on the assumption that you're not going to mind if iOS closes an app you opened possibly weeks or even months ago.

There are really only a handful of reasons why you'd ever want to fully close the apps on the multtasking pane -

1) If you're a clean freak
2) If you're troubleshooting some issue which requires you to close the app
3) If you're trying to hide something (i.e. closing an app that could contain confidential info, is password protected, etc)

In the case of number 3 the developer should have handled such a security concern.

Hope this helps!

agreeing w/ Rosco... i only close an app if it requires that after a settings change in order for it to take effect.