I differ on ATM... I tried out "Advanced Task Manager", "Taskiller", and "Advanced Task Killer" and prefered ATK in the end. not quite as complex and full functioned as ATM, but its quicker for me. It does have an exclude list, but unlike ATM, in ATK when an item is excluded, you'll never see it! This is PERFECT for quickly glancing at the list of running apps (the actual apps that are running and open for killing). So you only see a few things rather than digging through a list. ATK also allows you to setup an automatic action to happen when you fast or slow tap an app. Again, just that little bit of saved effort over tapping an app and then selecting what you want to do from the menu. ATM does a few more things, but ATK did EXACTLY what I wanted it to, and not a bit more, and it did it a little faster.
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