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Android is doing something pretty close in ICS. It's a column of apps with window previews, so not totally Expose-like, but a similar idea modified for the limited screen real estate.
E.g. http://cellphonequick.com/android-4-0-ice-cream-sandwich-now-offici...
(edited to strip out the img src tags since the comment preview shows the image but the actual posted comment strips it down to the tags...preview fail)
Edited 2011-12-21 23:57 UTC
Hmmm... Several mobile OSs implemented tile-based task switching, though most of them are dead or dying now. WebOS, PlaybookOS (?), WP7 and Harmattan come to mind.
As for why iOS itself didn't, perhaps it is because Apple believed that the iPhone's screen was too small for app tiles and didn't want to create visual inconsistencies between the iPhone and iPad versions of iOS ?
I did think of Webos, but it doesn't provide the nice one screen overview of expose because it requires you to swipe through all tiles. This resembles alt/cmd+tab more than expose imo. Don't really know about playbookos, wp7 or harmattan though.
IOS 1.0 couldn't really multitask, so I can understand why they didn't implement such a thing from the beginning. Nowadays IOS does some sort of multitasking and the DPI is really gone up with Iphone 4, which could make up a bit for the smaller screen. IOS doesn't encourage the user to close unused applications though, which would essentially cripple expose because it would have to display too much tiles.
You mean by implementing expose for ipad but not for iphone?
My Nokia N900 uses expose-like window switching. In fact, I tend to run 4-5 apps simultaneously on my N900, but only one at a time on my iPad.
The iPad just can't handle multiple apps for several reasons, not the least of which is that Steve didn't *want* it to! He succeeded admirably. ;-)





Member since:
2009-07-27
Good point, and now that I think I about it, I find it rather strange that no touch oriented platform, not even IOS, implements expose-like window switching. What is up with that?