Re: LibreOffice for Android
Sorry, but I use a computer for 80 hours a week, for everything from work to gaming and have done for the last 15 years (and quite a bit before that too).
Full-screen apps are full-screen for a reason. Sure, at times you use multiple programs / tabs / whatever but mostly that's because it's tricky to align everything you need to see on one screen otherwise. Forcing us all into overlaid, multiple apps isn't progress. There's a reason that the "full-screen, almost all of the time" usage pattern stayed with us and it's not due to lack of multi-tasking (I can remember Lotus Suite, which let you have multiple apps tiled on a DOS screen and working on both - back in the very early 90's before Windows took off).
It's because we need to see as much as possible of what's relevant and as little as possible of what's not. I spend 99% of my time with dozens of apps, all full-screen, each with dozens of sub-tabs, each full-screen, which I switch between at will. Information transference between them is minimal and well-defined and SHOULDN'T require them both onscreen (explorer drag/drop is a pain compared to Copy, Switch, Paste). There's nothing wrong with basic desktop or windowing concepts, we just don't use them to their full capability because, in the end, we're human and they are not and so they can do a lot more than we can handle at once.
And my Samsung Android phone is no exception. The single-most annoying feature, on phones and PC's, is things popping up over others and stealing your focus (either mental or keyboard), and things running "in the background" because they want to run all the time when you don't want them to.
The closest I get to "multi-views" is when programming in Eclipse. One window with code, one with debug information, one with the program. All tiled onto a full-screen because they are ALL relevant. But one minimise command or task-switch and they ALL go away at once, because they are all related. And I have several programmed "full-screen" layouts for code-bashing or debugging, for example. Because some info is relevant at some times and not at others and at other times I want to make FULL use of my screen on the task at hand (e.g. full source code views when I don't have debug windows showing).
In office work? I can't remember the last time I used a "windowed" pane, certainly not for more than a minute or so to compare two ends of a document, etc. Put it this way, I've been using OpenOffice for years instead of MS Office and I don't think I've *ever* used that function in it!
This is a lesson that smartphones have learned. The first thing they can ditch is true multitasking because most people will want to play a game OR make a phone call OR play with their settings, not all at the same time. My girlfriend has the same phone and it drives her mad when she's phoning that it *doesn't* always just go to a simple phone interface (with hang-up) for the entire duration of the call. She doesn't care that she was playing Angry Birds when it rang, or that she might be approaching her limit on the number of texts, or that the GPS has turned off. None of that matters because it's a damn phone in a phone call and the ONLY important functions are phone-call-related at that point. And if you're going to have them, they better be full-bloody-screen so you can read the damn things.
You somehow think that the PC was only full-screen apps - it's not, except by choice. Go look at any typical users usage (one who's found the maximise / minimise buttons preferably, but I can name dozens who still only run one app at a time even if they don't maximise them), go look at professional usage, hell I can spend two minutes lining up a single window where I'd like it. Full-screen, on the focus of the task you are doing. Maybe, just maybe, a statusbar showing the available apps, important cross-application notifications, and a clock (because that is a general-purpose item to the usage of a computer). Now look at the top bar of an Android phone. Same.
There's a reason phones run full-screen. And it's got nothing to do with resource limits. It's to do with usage patterns. Even as far back as Windows CE and Palms this was true.
Liberating us from full-screen apps is just a feature that hardly anyone will use, certainly not effectively. I don't want to spend my life arranging my phone-windows and working out where window X went or got tiled to. It has a small screen - USE IT ALL. If I need to use another program for something else, I'll switch to it and switch back. I can only watch one thing at once, I can only read one line at once, my eyes are not independent and multi-tasking, they are incredibly fast single-tasking units.
Sure, it's "cool" to play YouTube while looking at Google Maps but you can ONLY look at one of them at a time, even if you can hear multiple ones at once. For ALL of the screenshots of that app, I can't find one that I could actually see the point of beyond having a full-screen switched system. Either watch the match or read the papers. You can't do both, and if you're reading the papers, you can STILL hear the match and switch to it if anything interesting happens.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
