Finally....TRUE Multitasking

[pbrauer]

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One of the "holy grails" of tablets has been for people to actually multitask on their devices, where they can have more than one window open at a time, such as a browser and an app. While this has been demo'd before there has not been a lot of viable progress. Now one of the leading developers of this has dropped a huge Valentine's Day gift of love on the Android community by making their code Open Source!

Here is a pic of the app in action, with 3 windows in action simultaneously, a main window (YouTube) and two side windows (gTalk and the Browser), all working independently!

OnSkreen, the developers of Cornerstone have released a ROM for the Xoom with their app baked in, and provide a link for their source code here: Cornerstone - Now Open Source! for all those ROM chefs out there that want to cook their own.

There is also a YouTube video of this working for those that want to see it in action here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX8w3UZIjkc

Great news and can't wait to see where this goes!

Sources - (XDA-Developers, Cornerstone)

 

[yann2]

Thanks for the post, pbrauer - very interesting.

How can we not multitask properly, with the hardware that's so beefed up on these tablets, and un underlying unix OS?


That's a missing thing; at least make task switching work better, more transparently. I find the webOS way of opening tasks in 'cards', which can have full screen access, or with a up-swipe, be resides to 'card size', then slide aside for other tasks you want to load much cleaner, easier to understand.


You can see what's running. I got used to it pretty quickly on the phone, and it's very well done.


Killing a task? as simple as touching a 'card', flick it off to the screen top, and off it goes. Done.