I am building a multi-window application myself it is widget based and allows for individual developers to create "lite" versions of their apps in a windowed themeable fullscreen environment. I as well as a lot of other people that I have encountered in the seattle area with g1's are getting tired of having to constantly open and leave fullscreen applications that do simple interactions with web services. I am building a solution that will allow you to view things like facebook, tweets, weather, myspace etc. In a single scrollable screen. Each "window" starts out small and organized in a grid manner with simple yet important data available for viewing as a user wants to see more data they can maximize the window to take advantage of the available screen realestate. Most of the data can be "scrolled" horizontally or vertically within the small window depending on how the developer wants to structure their widget. I think that its great that google aquired android and then brought it to market in a short amount of time but it seems as though it also needs a beta stamp like most of the other products that are available. The imagination and energy has been there but the focus has not. As most everyone will agree android has been a good proof of concept and will be better a year from now but that can be said about anything that is released and has either funding or the energy of other developers willing to donate their time to make it great. I hope google stops looking at current OS UI's and starts to dream the future and not hold back. Android could potentially allow users to choose their preference between the current interaction that is available and a robust windowed/widget environment. I hope it gets fully realized
On Feb 15, 2009 9:32 PM, "Dianne Hackborn" <[email protected]> wrote: 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 c... [email protected] Note: please don't send private questions to me, as I don't have time to provide private support. ... --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
