Remember this? Turns out there was more to this rumour than we thought. As Steven Troughton-Smith notes (and yes, you can trust him):
So… just in case there was any doubt left… iOS 8’s SpringBoard has code to run two apps side-by-side. 1/4 size, 1/2 size, or 3/4 size
With Apple pushing developers to use Auto Layout as hard as they can, we can pretty much assume that yes, multiwindow is coming to iOS. Note, though, that this is not a Windows 8 or Samsung or whatever feature – multiwindow is as old as the graphical user interface itself. It will be a great addition to future iOS releases, and I can’t wait until Android implements multiwindow as well.
–when i’m on a phone call i’d use this, sometimes i need access to the keys and the mute when the phone is in the background.
–when i’m browsing i’d occasionally use this to make/read notes.
–when i’m streaming a media app like twonky or youtube i’m often multitasking so i could imagine having email or text going while watching the media.
hopefully apple designs it cleanly and doesn’t break the basic iOS premise of full focus on the apps and not on the OS.
Brace yourselves! Legions of Apple, uh… fans will come out of the woods to say that multiwindow on a mobile OS is the BEST thing since sliced bread – conveniently forgetting how they derided it when it came out on WP and other independent Android implementations, mind you – and that it takes Apple to show the world such innovation and therefore it is easy to conclude that makes perfectly sense for them to patent this feature and then try to sue the competition out of this planet!
I mean, they recently just invented Intents… erm… Extensions and widgets! And those evil copycats were fast on the xerox machines this time beating them to the door by a couple of years…
Extensions and Intents don’t work in exactly the same way, if you’ve handled the SDK (have you?) or read their documentation/watched the panels from WWDC.
Don’t really care to read that much on Apple tech, to be honest. I watched a few minutes of the panels, saw the reviews here and elsewhere and judging based on what I saw briefly, it was just Apple bragging about how they “created” things that have existed elsewhere ONCE AGAIN. Given the similarities between Intents and Extensions, I guess the joke still stands.
That thing with the large mail attachments on Yosemite – I think it is called Mail Drop – has existed since, I dunno, at least three years as a Thunderbird extension that integrates it with Dropbox and other cloud providers? I know I’ve been using it for a while…
With the exception of taking actual calls on the computer, PushBullet has provided – for years – everything the new integration between Apple devices are supposed to do between Android and several desktop OSes (although Apple’s implementation looks really nice and PushBullet has not been exactly bullet-proof to me).
As I stated earlier on another thread, Apple packages existing technology nicely but tends to push it as their own “creation” sometimes which is taken as gospel and exploded out of the proportion by the “faithful” – to put it mildly! – who then come to websites like this to spill lots of bullshit to people that, frankly, know better than that BUT actually may end up convincing the average Joe Sixpack that doesn’t know any better.
Everything the first poster on this thread stated as advantages of having multi window support on a mobile OS has already been – rightfully, I must add! – presented as advantages of Windows Phone when it first came out BUT people like him were mocking these capabilities because if Apple – at the time – did not bother to pursue that ability, it could not have been worthwhile, that people don’t need multitasking on a mobile device, etc., etc., etc.
Widgets? Interactive notifications? “Extensions”? Give me a break. Apple is obviously playing catch up but the, uh… faithful will never admit it. They are even following MS’s footsteps on that “flatness” on their UI, for Christ’s sake!
That’s why we make jokes like this from times to times. It is to expose their hypocrisy. But it should not be taken too harshly, tho. I was just poking our friends here to see their reaction (or not)…
So, you didn’t read the documentation, and you don’t know how the feature really works?
Why comment then? Confusing.
Apple ads features, and then announces them. Where exactly did they say they invented extensions? They just said the feature is coming to iOS. It’s only the hypersensitive like you that take what is discussed at a developers conference and somehow manage to take offence from it.
Intents and Extensions enable similar things, but are implemented very differently. I haven’t yet used Extensions, but intents are actually one of my pain points when it comes to Android development. I find intents a PITA. They are overused and the resulting requirement for constant object graph serialization and deserialization is death by boilerplate code. I would prefer if inter-APP communications were managed at the APP LEVEL instead of forcing them onto all of my activities, including those that don’t wish to participate (that would be most of the activities).
Tell my app when an intent has been received, and I’ll handle it from there. I’ll decide what activities to instantiate, I’ll launch them, and communicate with them with plain old method calls and objects. Don’t force-feed intents into every corner of my system and force me to serialize everything.
I find that Android activities do too much. I suspect that the reason why Google had to invent Fragments was because activities were already so bloated that some of the things they did no longer made any sense when you want to start nesting them. Fragments have become this marketing term that’s synonymous to flexible UI, but were in fact born out of the inflexibility of the original system. It’s ironic.
So now we’re stuck with two things that do similar things. One is leaner and more flexible (the Fragment), whereas the other one is compulsory (the Activity). A fragment can’t exist without a hosting activity. But it is recommended that we build most of our app using fragments, since they are reusable and one day we might want to build a tablet version of our app too. So what do we do? Well maybe we’ll inherit from a base SingleFragmentActivity and instantiate a fragment from within the SingleFragmentActivity subclass? Or we’ll create a shell Activity, inside of which we’ll create a nested Fragment class in which we’ll implement the actual functionality. That way we’re future-proof. So it’s doable, but quite frankly, it feels like it’s a hack to get around an inflexible system.
Edited 2014-06-11 06:14 UTC
I really hope Apple do not embrace the use of multi-window on iOS devices.
In fact I pray God They keep iOS simple. We don’t need another Android mess.
Yes, why bother with features? Having an Apple device is reward enough.
wow this biz of stereotyping apple users really is taking off.
yeah right — i derided and laughed at android having more than 1 window. how do they do that? wow such technology!
these are design decisions, nothing else.
owning android involves a lot of patting yourself on the back these days, it’s amazing how going from ripping off blackberry to ripping off apple has changed you folks
They also simultaneously introduced extensions to OS X, which is certainly novel for a desktop OS (writing plugins without requiring the hosting application to provide a plugin SDK)
In the context of tablets, its a differentiated feature that Microsoft used in Windows 8 One they knocked the iPad for NOT having in advertisements.
To write it off as “oh, this has existed before” despite it being on some unrelated form factor, I think, missed the whole point about why execution and implementation matters.
The interesting thing about multi window on a tablet isn’t even multi window, its how its implemented and how it works with touch.
Any one can implement multi windowing, but how you adapt applications written for touch input, operate within the resource constraints of tablet (or just thin, light, and low energy), and balance the ratio of content to screen real-estate that matters.
Do you have two apps side by side? Four? Ten? Do they support drag and drop between each other? Is it brokered due to the sandboxed permissions model? How about applications not written to take advantage of variable layout, what’s the story for them?
Do you have special UI states for when you’re adjacent to the screen edge? How about snapped in the middle of the screen? The UI for the former can be different by having more important UI near the side of the screen closest to the edge, as it’s logically where the thumbs are.
There are a lot of nuances that make the implementation the star of the show, rather than just multi windowing.
As much as a modern Mercedes S class differs from the very first car – it’s still a car.
Right, but details matter.
I dont care for multi window, I want my old start menu back, i want an app drawer button that gets rid of the home screens and opens on top of all other windows, transparent overlay obviously. If people actually want stupid widgets and icons in their phones, there can be an optional today screen that has all that bull, like weather, appointments, Facebook, etc…Stupid mobile oses get in the way..I run zeam launcher with no app drawer, widgets or icons on my screens just a beautiful picture and the status bar. Apple was the downfall of the mobile operating system. I just dont see why the home screens and home buttons are an integral part of mobile operating systems. Hopefully in another 10 years apple can finally integrate all the stuff they took out, and the sheeps accept a more complete, (er… complicated?) Instead of stripped out (arg…elegant, easy to use?) Useless system (that only does few things).
So it sounds like you already have what you want, so what exactly are you complaining about?
With Apple devs inclination to have Apps optimized for the existing devices sizes / aspect ratios I don’t see multi-window happening any time soon there.
Apple simply won’t ship a mechanism that limits app compatibility.
The only case it would work now is 4×4 layout that simulates IPad2 on new Ipad.
It could be is somewhat useful, but far from breakthrough. One could also imagine number of PIP scenarios, overlays, etc. All of them could be done right but, that’s not easy.
Edited 2014-06-11 10:23 UTC
It’s always been possible to build fluid layouts in iOS. Pre iOS 6, with Springs and Struts, it used to be a PITA, but post iOS 6 things are better with Auto Layout. It’s easy to do a fluid layout now if the developer is any good.
As for compatibility, Apple has usually implemented layout/resolution changes by asking apps to opt-in. So it’s definitely something that they could do.
One day the experts on modern UI design will also resign to the fact that MDI is a very useful concept in many use cases.
I’ve a mixed reaction to this. One of the strengths of iOS over Android is the clear difference between the iPad app and the iPhone apps. Whilst on Android the tablet shows just a blown up phone app, on iPad you are not even shown phone apps in the default search. All that is shown is apps specifically designed for that screen size.
Guess they are discovering multitasking