In a short while since its inception, the OmniROM team has become popular in the Android community for its ability to bring some unique features to their ROM. One of the highlight of the ROM, when it was released last year, was multi-window.

Samsung was the first company to bring multi-window to Android and the company’s work led to many custom ROM flashaholics and tinkers wishing that the same was possible in AOSP. The OmniROM team managed to bring multi-window to stock Android, which was actually usable and not just good enough for demonstration purposes.

However, the implementation always felt a bit clunky. There was no clear way to specify which app was to stay at the top and which one at the bottom. It was never clear as to how a user would restore an app back to full screen mode.

XplodWild, the main developer of multi-window had been looking for a solution to poor usability issue of multi-window since quite a while until he stumbled upon some videos showing multi-tasking in action on webOS. The ex-Palm OS may have never got the success it deserved, but it definitely got a lot of things right including multi-tasking by simply stacking apps to the side of the screen. 

XplodWild has already made a concept video showing how this side stacking of apps will work under OmniROM.

http://youtu.be/u5_eKo6Jbzk

Now that there is a solid implementation of multi-window on paper, XplodWild has started working on updating his multi-window patch set to improve its usability. Hopefully, we will see the fruits of his effort in a nightly of OmniROM sometime soon.