Aaron Dot MS

People miss the cards style multitasking.

So do I, so I’m going to bring it back to the iPhone.

In fact, I’ve been keeping a secret; it’s in beta. Right now. I’d been wanting card switching on 4.x for a while now, and had rewritten Multifl0w from scratch to run with improved speed expandability. But I wanted something different, which is why I made the Exposé style first. I absolutely love the one-tap-away ability of it.

If you haven’t seen the Exposé style switching, here’s a picture (maybe this will keep your attention):

But there was a problem: it didn’t scale well for tons of apps. I don’t mind this at all; I have around 4 apps that I use on a regular basis (don’t worry, the compass in the picture is not one of them), and that’s it. But people seem to really miss this. They’re dying to have more than 9 apps visible at the same time. If you’re one of these people: you’re awesome.

I want to make something you’ll love. I want Multifl0w to be a reason to jailbreak, and something that makes those “open platform phone” users jealous because they don’t have cool stuff like this. Perhaps Apple will even take note. After all, they’ve taken after the jailbreak scene in copy/paste, spell checking, rotation inhibitor, and “backgrounding”. Heck, jailbreakers even had third party apps before an official version came to the masses.

Anyway, it’s coming along well so far. It’ll be done when it’s done, but I’m guessing a mid-January release.

Pics or it didn’t happen:

Also, it’s really cool on an iPad :)

Edit: Just to clarify, the Expose mode will still remain an option.

I never really was sure why spotlight was on the left side. Sure, it’s handy, and it’s less work for the coders when a new icons list needs to be added, but it would be nice for Apple to at least give us the option to have Spotlight on the right side. Instead of the home button zooming between the two left pages, (spotlight and first homescreen page, the iOS default), the home button could zoom back and forth to the ends of the pages. That way you could quickly get to either end of your icons. But if you find yourself scrolling through pages and pages of icons to get to the icon you want, there’s a tweak for that already: Ryan Petrich’s Overboard tweak. It’s a great way to move around the homescreen quickly, and it looks cool while doing it. (And, of course, it’s fully compatibile with my Barrel tweak).

I never took the time to work out all the details in this tweak, just wanted to see how it would feel. As you can see, the corners of the search view need to be fixed, as well as the page indicator icon. If someone was new to MobileSubstrate and wanted a good “learning” tweak to make, I think this would be a great place to start.