Guest post by “Samsung’s recent Android 4.1.2 upgrade for the Galaxy Note 10.1 adds power and flexibility to the company’s unique offering of Android multiwindowing features. With this update, the Galaxy Note 10.1 can run up to 16 multiwindow-enabled Android apps at once, Windows/Mac-like, on a single screen. Apps endowed with Samsung’s multiwindow technology are usable in three viewing modes: full screen, dual view, and cascade view.” There are already some complaining this represents a dangerous fork of Android. I thinks it’s a step in the right direction.
Well then you’d be better off buying a laptop instead of tablet :p
I will say, I quite liked the idea behind Win8’s multi-Window in (the artist formally known as) Metro. It’s clean way of tiling Windows. But even that would only be practical on a larger tablet (such as this 10″). Anything smaller and managing Windows will be a nightmare (it’s hard enough tapping hyperlinks with my imprecise, stubby, fingers). But overlapping Windows is just a no-no for any tablet.
What’s worse, Samsung’s implementation isn’t even elegantly done. Granted, I don’t think there is an elegant way to overlap windows on a tablet. But even so, that just looks bad. Seriously Samsung, what were you thinking?
Sometimes I really do wish Samsung left the software development to Google.
This. Please keep it stock, people. If you want to take Android, gussy it up and put your shitty bloatware all over it, then fork the OS like Amazon did and don’t call it Android. ‘But xyz’s bloatware isn’t that bad!’ Yeah, like having an infected scrotum isn’t that bad
Sure, we’d all prefer Google to add proper tiling. Where’re they when you need them.
Just because Android doesn’t have every feature under the sun right now doesn’t mean that everybody and their grandma should start f**king with it.
Really? Why was it open sourced then?
Honestly, I have no idea. Since Google keeps the main code base under lock and key, opening the source code seems to serve no other purpose than to ensure that vendors can fragment the shit out of it. It’s bad enough that people consider the Kindle Fire to be an Android tablet (which it isn’t):
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/kindle-fire-nabs-33-of-andro…
Shortsighted and lacking proper fact hunting opinion.
Google incorporated DOZENS of vendor specific features into its upstream Android.
If fact most of UI features where at least inspired by OEM’s software.
This time it will be same thing. Google will at least add split mode.
Because they use GPL code and the license dictates that they must provide the source code for any changes they make?
Bullshit. All Android user space is Apache or BSD licensed. They only had to provide sources for the kernel.
Really? I could not care any less. You, however, could do with learning a few simple common manners. They cost zero $$’s, so even you can afford them. No excuses.
Wow, talk about hypocrisy: http://www.google.com/search?q=henderson101+bullshit+site%3Aosn…
No, and you seem to need a lesson in grammar and punctuation too.
Have you noticed the reason yet? You do understand the concept of “asking a question”, right? You understand why your response was offensive, or you are still being an arrogant prick?
Edit – also, look at the links. How many are directly attacking forum commenters? The top 10 I can see are talking about stories or situations including my seeming hate of Gene Munster (king of bullshit.)
Edited 2013-01-30 17:28 UTC
Stop whining like a 5 yo. You phrased that “question” like a statement. And you clearly have no problem making offensive comments to others; Google search giving one false hit is no excuse.
Not really. Eg Chrome/WebKit is LGPL. Anyhow, the point is Google opensourced all components (with exceptions like there service-integration) and that gives those using it to make products the options to
1) Differentiate. Not only with another theme but in near unlimited ways including adding new features they think customers would like. That Samsung does exactly that and that those features are received well (see comments here and there sales) is an indicator that it works.
2) It gives partners more security in there investment. They have control over the software stack and not depend on Google for every step they take.
3) It is 3th party hacker friendly and projects like CyanogenMod profit what in turn is good for customers and hence the platform profits,
4) Others are able to make and offer patches back to Google, to port Android, to reuse code.
Lot of advantages that make the platform stronger, help it grow. And that, Android’s grow, was always top priority for Google. It helps spread then platform and there services. That Amazon forked Android is an acceptable side-effect (and yet Google even profits there).
So, what would be the advantages to not opensource?
Edited 2013-01-29 16:26 UTC
Chrome is not a part of Android platform. It’s an optional Google app. IIUC, anyone can write and distribute GPL and LGPL apps via Play store.
Ask on Apple forum
Chrome-WebKit and Chrome-V8 are even very central parts of the core libraries. See http://www.anddev.org/images/android/system_architecture.png
Only the Chrome shell is. The Chrome-variant of WebKit and the V8 Javascript-interpreter are core components. They are also exposed through Android API to allow to write all kind if different UI-shells on top, to give platform support to Javascript, WebGL, SVG, etc.
That answer isn’t even close related to my question. It may if your point is that it prevents others from using your software too to make products. But that was never ever a goal for Android. Google didn’t even had any consumer products based on Android. It was much later Google came in to make Nexus (which they not make themselfs too) and even later when they took over Moto (where patents where the driving force and not necessarly Android consumer devices). From the beginning, when the OHA was formed, the concept was to focus on the service-side and have partners to make the actual products. Services are Google’s core-business, where they made the money, not selling devices. Very different from Apple.
All in all you seem to agree that there is NO single advantage in not open-sourcing for Google but there are lots of advantages in open-sourcing Android.
Edited 2013-01-30 09:48 UTC
cdude,
Sorry to go off-topic but please study a little more on the correct usages of
1) there / their / they’re
2) where / were
because reading your posts above was genuinely painful.
There’s more, but I appreciate you’re probably not a native speaker and I don’t want to be *that* much of an asshole.
Thanks
I’m genuinely not that fussed about proper tiling. Like I said in my original post; it’s always going to be a little awkward on smaller screens (which the vast majority of Android ROMs are running on).
Plus I don’t really think you can criticize Google here as they’re much quicker at pushing out new features than Microsoft and Apple (although maybe that trend is changing?)
Edited 2013-01-29 10:11 UTC
10″ is hardly a “smaller screen”. It’s twice the size of Nexus 7. The first thing I thought was: there’s too much space to usefully cover in most apps; this can show more than one app at a time, e.g. mail and calendar and notes or weather. Other tablets had tiling before, e.g. Adam. We can hardly fail Samsung for trying to make the device more useful. The idea is right, and however crappy their implementation is you don’t have to use it. Maybe Google will do it better in stock.
I wasn’t suggesting a 10″ tablet is small.
Let me refer you back to my original comment for better context:
Thus my point you’re querying is in reference to how most Android powered devices are 7″ and under.
Edited 2013-01-29 14:39 UTC
Well, no one’s saying you need tilling on your phone. Just like you don’t want tablet apps to be scaled up phone versions, and some apps have different layouts for tablets, you may well want more windowing features on bigger screens. It’s true that so far Android is mostly on phones and 7″ tablets, but now Google released the official 10″. They didn’t put much work into using all that new space compared with 7″, though.
What “new space”? Unless the resolution is higher on the larger screens, there isn’t technically any more space – it’s just a lower pixel density. However to answer your point, Google did put a lot of work into supporting different screen sizes and resolutions.
The Android SDK is developed in such a way that each application can have different layouts for different screen resolutions and dimensions. So a 10″ screen can display a slightly more tweaked interface than a 7″ and a 4″. (I expect you’re already be aware of this much though).
All this has been in place since Android 2.0, but even with the maturity of the APIs, sadly not all developers write adaptive apps – which is why you see some that look scaled. This is then the fault of the app developers rather than a lack of support from Google (however I wouldn’t go too hard on the app dev’s, for reasons I’ll explain later on).
It’s also worth noting that a lot of phone / tablet OS’s could not, until recently, handle different resolutions. Remember when the iPad was first released and apps had to be scales up? Then when Apple changed the aspect ratio on the iPhone and implemented the laughable “black bar solution” for existing apps. And WebOS (as much as I love that platform) was even worse; it wouldn’t even scale up apps built in the same aspect ratio. So phone apps would literally have a huge amount of black space surrounding them when run on a tablet (if I recall correctly, HP designed a picture of a smart phone that the app would sit inside – to reduce appearance of the huge back frames – but even that looked tacky).
So if you really want to argue about wasted space, then perhaps you should look at how badly some of the competing platforms handle different resolutions and then how well Android phone and tablet applications coexist. And then if you still want to kick off at Google, then blame them for allowing Android to get so fragmented; because the real issue here is developers being overwhelmed rather than Android not bothering to take advantage of higher screen resolutions (and I can say this from personal experience having written a few Android apps myself).
<sarcasm>
But all of this is moot because it’s so much easier for anonymous online personalities to whine about the lack of one feature that is almost entire useless on 99% of installs and not even present in all bar one of the competing OSs.
</sarcasm>
edit: and I realise I’m probably coming off as a bit of a Google-fanboy. I’m genuinely not. I just you’re “making a mountain out of a molehill” (British expression, not sure if it’s known else where http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_a_mountain_out_of_a_molehill ).
There’s much worse issues with Android than the lack of tiling. So I’d rather Google spend their time addressing them first.
Edited 2013-01-29 18:04 UTC
I never tried WebOS, but I have started looking into the Enyo framework they used for the WebOS apps and afaik the only WebOS device they released was running Enyo 1.0?
Enyo 2.x seems to be doing a very good job scaling between any number of resolutions. It has, like Android, built in support for making different layouts for different resolutions.
I have only started messing with it however, so I don’t know yet how much it handles by itself and how much must be done by the app developer..
But it’s atleast a very interesting framework imo.
Anyways, I agree tiling could be useful on some Android devices, but cascaded windows is a big nono. Hell app-windows at all are a big nono on touch devices imo. Tiling have some advantages if done right (ie: not the way Microsoft did it with Metro+Desktop apps).
But if it should be done in Android, it should be standardised upstream, not bastardised by Samsung, leading to even more fragmentation.
Edited 2013-01-29 20:35 UTC
I do not want to argue about Android’s implementation on handling different screen size and resolutions. I do consider it the most advanced in mobile space.
But:
The display has the role to convert digital information into something humans can sense. My eyes barely make the difference between two high DPI resolutions and they don’t care about anything over retina display. And my hands… they care even less (and I don’t have the biggest hands in the world). So the raw size of the screen technically can influence a lot the handling of an app (and android knows that or it would not care about DPI).
This said, Samsungs idea is good, and while I am not whining about the fact that google has not implement it yet, I do think it would be a nice addition. I haven’t try it yet but an official, well thought implementation would be nice. So I would not bash Samsung for modifying android in this way. Android history proved that google learned a lot from it’s OEM and integrated there best ideas.
Anyway, am I the only one who thinks that fragmentation is not a problem for android. Well it is regarding the updates, but not regarding different devices that do use the latest version of android.
Do you even know what Nexus 10 is? Nexus 10 has 2560×1600 resolution at 300 ppi. So yes, “technically” it has a ton of new space compared to Nexus 7 (and pretty much anything else). But your argument is completely wrong anyway. Screen space is measured in cm, not in pixels. Lower ppi just means lower quality rendering. Just because, say, Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 have almost the same resolution doesn’t mean you want to use the same layout on both: the screen size difference is too big.
Way to completely miss the point. Android is fairly good at showing apps at different resolutions. It does not automagically optimize apps layouts to different screen sizes. Bigger screen means that you can show more controls, add/improve sidebars, show more information in list elements etc. Android as a platform supports doing so, but app developers have to actually put an effort into thinking through and creating these layouts.
What you forgot is that Google is also an app developer, not just a platform provider. My point is that Google didn’t do much in their own apps, which if you haven’t noticed they ship a whole bunch, to use the new space on 10″.
Why would I want to do that? I don’t plan to buy devices with them or develop for them.
Nice ad hominem attack.
The only people whining in this thread are ones like yourself, who argue Samsung should not be allowed to modify Android. Everyone else is happy some progress is being made.
And sure, Android has a long list of issues, and tiling is not even on top of that list. Having a 10″ Nexus tablet was not top of the list either. So what? No one should be allowed to work on non-top priority items? What’s your point? Never mind. I don’t think you have one.
Stupid Google, why did they introduce multitasking in Android 1.x and multiuser support in 4.2, when no competing OSs had/have them? What a waste of time. /s
Fair point.
I didn’t say you do want to use the same interface at that screen size. Quite the opposite in fact; this one of the few arguments we’ve seen eye-to-eye on.
I think we’re both missing the point to be honest. But that’s what happens when any discussion on here reaches this many replies.
I never said it did. In fact I repeatedly said it was developers that did that. Repeatedly
Which is what I said. Repeatedly.
I hadn’t forgotten that Google is an app developer. I’ve just not used their apps at that high a resolution before and, until just now, nobody had mentioned that problem.
Actually that was never my point. I was saying that Samsung’s implementation is crappy. If you have issue with the other peoples comments then take that up with the people who made them.
edit: that is unless you’re on about my flippant remark I said at the start of the thread. “Sometimes I really do wish Samsung left the software development to Google.“?
What I meant about that was that Samsung’s additions are almost always crappy – so I wish they shipped stock ROMs. I’m not suggesting that Google should not allow Samsung to make modifications; I’m just despairing at how bad their modifications are.
I suspect you’re reading a little too much into my comments
My point was quite clear when I said you were making a mountain out of a molehill. You’re basically bitching about trivial things.
Multi-tasking on phones and PDA’s existed long before Android and it’s definitely a non-trivial feature.
You have more of a point about multi-user support though. Personally it’s the biggest new feature I want to see on Android as many households share a tablet. But that’s just my opinion.
What I was thinking more about when I cited Android’s woes were:
* a clampdown on malware (I’m not even sure how Google would go about this, but there is a serious issue there)
* fixing their abysmal emulator in the SDK
* addressing the fragmentation issue (and I don’t mean stopping companies like Samsung from adding Windowing – I mean companies shipping incompatible ROMs)
That’s just off the top of my head and thankfully Google are addressing the last point. But I think the malware issue should be given priority above all else. But again, that’s just my opinion. You might considering tiling of greater importance.
Agreed.
That was my point all along: Google didn’t really optimize their own apps for 10″, and it will take a long time till most apps in the store will be optimized. Some apps just don’t have enough content to put on 10″. A number of iPad apps I’ve seen just put a large image on the background: good if you just use it as a fancy photo frame, bad if you want the most of your device.
Some OS level solution like tiling can improve things for many apps without developers spending their time on it, or spending less time. It may not be perfect or work for every app, or be the top thing Android needs, but it’s a useful thing to have.
Except that I’m not bitching. You’re bitching at Samsung. I’m saying their goal is right, and the implementation will improve. In pretty much every category Samsung starts with crappy products and works their way up to being among the best for the money.
IIUC Google is working on all of these.
With the greatest of respect, you really didn’t make that point clear at all.
You kept talking about Google and Android but never once mentioned any of Google’s apps, so the context of your complaint seemed to be about Android itself rather than Google’s apps on Android.
In all honesty, I probably wouldn’t have argued with you had I realised this
I know I’m nitpicking here, but that might actually cause more work for developers as they’d have to rewrite any code that didn’t expect app sizes to change mid-execution (ie at the moment you can expect screen size to be static. but now they’d have to write the app so that it dynamically changes the layout while the app is running).
Also, in the SDK itself, I’d have expected the tile size functions to be different to the screen size functions, so there might potentially be a huge can of worms in implementing such a ‘minor’ feature:
* apps wanting to support tiling properly would have to be compiled to support the new tile-size APIs
* those APIs will only be available in the latest SDKs
* thus apps would have to be compiled against the latest version of Android
* and thus all of the older devices running older versions of Android are now incompatible.
Obviously there’s a cleaner way to go about this and I’m interested in how Samsung have worked around this issue. But now that I think about the technical complications a bit more, it may not be as simple for developers as it originally seems.
(though I’m not trying to argue that this is a reason for such features not to be implemented!)
I think that is more a matter of opinion. I don’t think Samsung phones are the best for the money and while I’ll agree that TouchWiz has slowly (and I mean at a snails pace) improved with time, I think it’s still a massive devolution of the quality in vanilla Android.
That’s just my opinion though
Very good point. Size can already change dynamically due to screen orientation change though, so may be it’s possible to piggyback on that. But I’m sure there are many subtle issues the real implementation will have to deal with.
Samsung makes a lot more than phones. And I’ve never said they are the best.
This is why stock Linux distributions will never happen in the desktop.
OEMs want product differentiation, to show the customers they offer something different from the stock product you can get everywhere.
I can hardly wait for Samsung Linux and similar products from other vendors.
This is why OEMs are dying. They want to stand out and make money, this leads to the craptacular amount of crapware on pcs, plus the oem’s own “support software” to make it easier to order more ink or a completely new computer when the current one is too overloaded with crap the crapware installs.
This is why Microsoft is moving into hardware.
With linux, they could differentiate with things like kde plasmoids, themes, and ease of use ( zero config for your specific hardware), without greatly affecting its speed or functionality.
But of course MS office would be out of the question.
I know it would probably make hardware expensive again, but I miss the all-in-one computers from the late 80’s, Amiga, Atari, Mac and so on.
The differentiation was made by the full package, hardware + software, and not via crapware.
They could probably do something close to that with Windows, too – but guess what they choose to do.
And actually, Android Linux phones typically come with ~crapware included…
I don’t get it. Why would I want to see multiple apps running at once on such a relatively small screen? What I would rather see is a way to keep ANY app running in the background without it specifically being coded to do so. And, here’s the kicker… I want to be able to close it! Without killing it with the back button. No matter what they say, I still think I’m smarter than Android is when it comes to managing my device’s memory. I’m organized enough to remember and to choose which apps will keep running and which will be closed.
Tap app switcher button, swipe unneeded app away; app closes.
Actually app sometimes (or partially) closes.
Edited 2013-01-29 17:53 UTC
Have you tried WebOS and its cards ?
Kochise
Sure. But what about your battery? Managing the dozens of the background tasks on Android is a full time job.
What dozend of background tasks you refer too? At Android apps in background may closed anytime and are restored when you switch back making them irrelevant for battery.
Only exceptions are services which register themselfs so Android does keep them running even in background. There are not dozend of them. There are usually zero as default (except you copy a file or download in which case a service is running till the job is done).
The argument with manually managing closing apps to save battery is not really one. Just move them to background and trust the system to close them if they consume to much mem/cpu/battery. No point in doing it manually except for your own feeling of control and habits from other OS’s.
If you need to look up multiple things and/or do multiple cut-pastes, e.g. from a web page to an email.
Well, most people tend think they’re smarter than they really are – illusory superiority (and similar) is one of more widespread cognitive biases ;P
Overall an interesting feature. Though I think this one will stay in the realm of techies.
From my own experience, I’ve seen users change their desktop behaviour to match the iOS experience. That is to say, they never previously used virtual desktops, but now use them regularly since MacOS introduced the Full Screen view for desktop apps. That’s clearly the polar opposite of this development.
Still the more variations the better. I do believe forking represents a short term problem for Android but in the long run it’s not a bad thing. Google releases will incorporate the best features in all the variants. The OEMS are basically providing Google with a nice test bed for new ideas.
Agreed, as long as Google keeps pushing ahead with Android development as fast as it is.
I saw a commercial where LG phones already did this. I think it was the Optimus G was updated for it. Is this really a fork? I thought it was just a feature that wasn’t enabled in all builds, and not so much a fork.
Is it just me that’s reading this and thinking “4.1? Why aren’t they doing this on 4.2?”
That and “Ah, another new invention we have since years on desktops. Patent it before Apple does!”
If I want goddam windowing on a tablet, I’d rather install the upcoming Ubuntu for tablets/phones than use Android. Android is ok like it is, it doesn’t need windows.
I for sure don’t want windows on goddam phone.
And if I want to use a desktop I will run an OS designed for desktops, unlike Windows 8.
Unlike many iOS features, if you don’t want to use them, you can just ignore it.
Now just go and maximize the dos command window…
If I can’t configure its behaviour in Haskell, I’m not interested. =P
Haskell is for carebears, real men use Cobol!
Real man produce the electricity to represent binary true, false and maybe’s themselfs using amount of Tequilla!
Edited 2013-01-29 16:35 UTC
Good bye Windows ! It will requires more refining, but towards Android 6, we’ll get a mature yet easy to use OS that is not as bloated Windows and Ubuntu currently are, thus usable even by by parents.
Kochise
Requires quad core, 2GB of RAM, and ~2GB of storage for OS? Sounds like bloat to me.
Really ? You wanna know what’s a real bloat to me ? Read this : http://www.osnews.com/story/26741/64GB_Surface_Pro_has_only_23GB_us…
With size of Android apps hardly above 10 MB (beside games) and memory fully expandable with microSDHC cards (beside Nexus line) do the math !
Kochise
Ubuntu Bloated? What part of Ubuntu would you refer to as bloat? Unity?
If part of it annoys you, just remove or replace it.
One important factor is that the change is meant primarily for “Galaxy Note” series devices.
These add precision input that quite significantly alters assumptions that underly touch guis paradigms.
Note devices are also what Samsung hopes to be their ultimate differentiation engine. If they can indeed squeeze added value from the pen input through input paradigm extension I believe this hope is justified.
Android still has problem with tablet optimized apps.
Another way I see those efforts is that multiwindow mode is a way to effectively utilize apps that only have phone layout without wasting screen space.
Some apps which never got adapted to proper work at small, medium and large may. Hard to impossible to force any app-dev to do right. Not only when it comes to screen size but also to standard UI concepts like not using a dark font on a dark blackground, not write text in all upper-case and not annoy.
What matters is most apps using newer Android API’s do, its easy to handle different form factors in your app and the number of major apps doing it right are improving.
What a marvelous innovation! I foresee a time in the not too distant future where people want their tablets to use full physical keyboards, and hook up to their big screen TVs! Of course this will require some device to ‘tap’ things without touching the screen. Perhaps some as of yet uninvented USB peripheral? They may even want a stable power outlet and the option of a wired internet connection for faster downloads. Then they’ll be able to surf the web while video chatting on skype, and maybe even not be tied down to a phone carrier. Oh the future of computing is just around the corner. Soon we will enter the age of the desktop PC!
Nope, the tablet form factor is almost the best out there, I’m currently writing from my Nexus 7. It’s just that for a more steady business, say a little office job, a hardware keyboard is more comfortable, whatever you may believe. The 10″ Asus Transformer Pad is just the right balance between mobility and serious business. In fact, ultra portable are sure more powerful but too expensive. A 450 euros device that draw 3W of energy is far enough for 95 percent of cases, and you can bear to wait a little for the remaining 5.
Kochise