No we have nothing on our roadmap along these lines at this point. Not speaking for anyone else involved with Android, but personally I don't really see a big benefit of such a facility for any of the form factors that people are interested in putting Android on. Even at the netbook category, my experience running Windows on such screens is that I generally want to keep the current application maximized so that it can use all of the available screen space. If you then look at such a device with a touch UI, where the UI elements need to be larger to be touchable, keeping things maximized is even more natural.
My personal main interests for a netbook would be in exploring different system UI elements on the screen (such as taking a side to show recent apps or richer notifications you can see all of the time), and having a really good task switcher for moving between applications. Also a desktop-style window manager is really not something I have any interest in at all. This introduces a much more complicated interaction model for the user, having to do meta-window management of the things they are actually using, for questionable gain in the kinds of form-factors Android is targetting. I am just not interested in turning Android into a desktop operating system. That is a whole different world, interaction model, and set of requirements, which is quite different than Android today. Certainly, any such work that negatively impacts the UI for our target devices (cell phones and such) by making it slower, more complicated, etc, is something that would be questionable on accepting back to the main platform. I also have a hard time seeing why someone wouldn't just use GTK or KDE if that is the kind of UI they want. At any rate, I personally believe that the area of devices where it makes sense to have the current application take the whole screen is a large enough swath of things to keep things interesting, I suspect larger than everything that looks like a desktop UI. ;) On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 8:32 PM, stefoid <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi Dianne. - Any chance that Google has this kind of modification on > the horizon? I think it might be an increasingly popular request > given the conflicting requirements for smaller and smaller devices > with larger and larger screen real estate. > > Another consideration is using android for internet-tablet / net PC > kinds of devices, ie.e with lots more screen realestate than say, an > iPhone sized device. The limitation of one-fullscreen-activity-at-a- > time would really start to grate when you have the space available to > do more. > > Really, the dual-screen thing is a bit of a furphy, what is really > needed is more of a windowing/application management system that > supports multiple non-fullscreen apps running active concurently. > > Obviously Android wasnt originally built with that in mind, but if it > wants to maintain momentum/mind share, its going to have to look at > that limitation sooner rather than later dont you think? > > Very interested in the thoughts of the Android team on this,. > > cheers > > Steve > > On Feb 15, 8:34 pm, Dianne Hackborn <[email protected]> wrote: > > As I replied before, this is going to be very non-trivial to do, and will > > require that you at least get a good understanding of > WIndowManagerService > > and ActivityManagerService. The former is the component that decides how > > windows are placed on-screen, and the latter is the one that manages the > > stack of activities and tasks. > > > > The first thing you'll probably notice that the concept of a single stack > of > > application-kind-of-things is firmly baked into both of those, so > allowing > > for two such stacks is going to require significant restructuring of > those > > parts. > > > > > > > > On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 8:49 PM, saroj <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > Hello all, > > > > > I need to split the Android screen into two parts and run 2 > > > applications (app A and app B) simultaneously. app A will run on > > > screen 1 and app B will run on screen 2. Both are visible to the > > > users. I need to implement this thing in the Android Framework. > > > > > How to do it ? > > > > > Waiting for your valuable inputs..... > > > > > Regards, > > > Saroj K Pradhan > > > > -- > > Dianne Hackborn > > Android framework engineer > > [email protected] > > > > Note: please don't send private questions to me, as I don't have time to > > provide private support. All such questions should be posted on public > > forums, where I and others can see and answer them. > > > -- Dianne Hackborn Android framework engineer [email protected] Note: please don't send private questions to me, as I don't have time to provide private support. All such questions should be posted on public forums, where I and others can see and answer them. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "android-framework" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-framework?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
