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An Early Look At Android M's Multi-Window Mode For Tablets
Ars Technica has a look at the experimental multi-window mode in the just-announced Android M. It's not a headlining feature yet: "buggy, busted, and buried, but intriguing nonetheless" is how Ars describes it. Android Police is similarly faint in its praise. All that might be true, but to many users even a partly working multi-window mode would be welcome, especially one blessed by Google. (Some Samsung users have had multi-window support for a while, but not built into the OS proper, and multi-window capabilities can be found via app, too.)
So now after a few years of updates you have have MULTIPLE apps slowing your phone or tablet to a crawl!
When will Firefox OS be getting this functionality?
Obviously - given the amount of stuffing around and warnings you apparently get when enabling it - this feature is not meant to be used yet, but as far as it goes what is different to say Samsung's implementation? I've seen the Samsung one and it seems to work fine (in the limited cases I used it) so is there some differentiating feature here? Like APIs for apps to share resources or something? Aside from the vendor-specific aspect of Samsung's one of course.
Having also used multi-windowing on an x86 Surface (pretty sure the ARM ones had it too) with Windows 8.1 I think this is going to be a huge feature in terms of productivity for Android if they can standardize it on the platform, having the apps side-by-side when you are using multiple programs is so much better than having to switch between them.
Another dysfunctional window manager. On my tablet there are already multiple apps running.
Is it that hard to write a SMALL window manager that works? Looks like everyone writes one before they write a web browser.
This is very old news. Multi-window Android is already here for literally years. Made by Samsung.
why would anyone want to run multiple Redmonds?
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
The geniuses at Microsoft carefully followed the fashion to ensure that "Apps" are only single windowed, just like the so successful i*s. And now some ar*hole at Google is making them put it all back again. It is hard to be a non-thinking follower.
As for productivity... it's a tablet OS, it's consumptive, not productive.
The artificial distinction drawn between "consumptive" and "productive" user interfaces on a device that can theoretically support both is the problem. It acts as a barrier to participatory culture, as a lot of people don't have $400 to splurge on a "productive" device when they get the itch to do something "productive".
It's (normally) missing a keyboard
For someone who already bought a tablet computer or received one as a gift, a $50 Bluetooth keyboard is still less expensive than a $400 "productive computer".
(always missing) a mouse so you can actually copy and paste with some accuracy and speed
True, the text selection mechanism on Android through level L leaves something to be desired. But that's an argument for improving the text selection mechanism, not for continuing "consumptive" policies.
When I hold the home button I see the most recent windows and can jump to the one I wish to bring up. That's a simple window manager. If you want more it's not simple anymore.
My tablet's screen is twice as big as that of a phone. All I really miss is the ability to edit in one app while referring to information displayed through another app. Are you trying to claim that a simple side-by-side tiling window manager is "not simple anymore"? Heck, Windows 1 had that.
But how many apps support multi-window operation? Last time I checked the Android CDD, it allowed apps to assume that the screen size will never change after installation, other than by exchanging width and height. As far as I can tell, apps have to opt-in to Samsung's multi-window mode, and only developers of apps who regularly test on a larger Samsung Android device (Galaxy Note, Galaxy Tab) are likely to enable that.
reinvent the tiling wm?
my, such progress.
Ridiculous, software development has regressed at least two decades. We wrote our own windowing system on the Apple IIGS in high-school. In fucking high school!
The geniuses at Microsoft carefully followed the fashion to ensure that "Apps" are only single windowed
How so? Windows 8's Windows Runtime environment introduced the "Snap an App" feature, which allows a 3:1 split of the horizontal space. Press Win+Period, and one Windows Runtime app fills 1/4 of the screen's width, roughly as wide as a cell phone's display, and the other 3/4 shows either the desktop or another Windows Runtime app. Windows 8.1 allowed changing the ratio, reminiscent of the tiling window manager that shipped with Windows 1.
Once you understand Snap an App, you'll realize that the most serious fault of Windows 8 was that the Start screen could not open snapped. A snapped Start screen would have been equivalent to the Start menu of previous Windows versions.
This is a porn-driven OS enhancement, right?
What makes you think that ANY implementation regardless of who it's from, (Google, Samsung, etc), is going to work correctly if the assumption is: "My app always runs in full screen mode, and can completely trash the framebuffer without care."?
The real WTF is how this assumption survived in Android H through L. Google should have invalidated this assumption way back in Honeycomb, the first tablet-optimized version of Android.
I didn't RTFA (hey, this is Slashdot) but I could see where recent tablet iterations have such high DPI that it might be most useful for multi-window mode to split the screen and scale the app windows to fit more than one app at a time on the screen.
It seems like a lot of apps have a kind of defined layout and not much if any layout intelligence built into them, so changing their window size to less than screen size would seem to require many apps to be rewritten to support other windows sizes than full screen.
Scaling the entire app display to fit the window size would seem to solve much of this, with the caveat that apps with a fine degree of detail in their controls and small text to begin with might be less than useful. But for many, monitoring the content changes might be enough even if 100% of the controls or detail isn't legible.
Maybe you should run Windows?
There was a period of at least a year when makers of Windows laptops essentially ignored the 10-inch size class in favor of the higher-margin tablet segment. (See Does 2012 Mark the End of the Netbook?) This wasn't solved until ASUS brought out the Transformer Book.
There was command line user interface, then (multiple) windows user interface, then single screen user interface (android/IOS/windows phone), now going back to multiple windows user interface ..... next would be going back to command line interface. Cool.
To X11 from 1980's.
We're almost full circle back to laptops running windows... :-/