Hasta La Gadget!

It’s been a couple months since we first saw the fruits of team Paranoid Android’s labor around in-app pop-up window multitasking, and it looks like Paul Henschel and co. are finally sharing the finished product. HALO, as it’s called, loosely combines the ideas behind Samsung’s Multi Window and FaceBook’s Chat Heads into a slick multitasking interface. The feature is activated from the notification tray. It places an icon — or halo — on the display, which can be moved around very much like Chat Heads, or dismissed by double-tapping and dragging it towards the red X at the top. Swiping sideways from the halo shows a series of white lines and text bubbles that match and highlight the notifications in the status bar. Releasing your finger is like tapping on the selected notification, but instead of launching full-screen, the app opens in a pop-up window on top of whatever’s already running, just like Multi Window. The background app continues to run while you interact with the foreground app — to dismiss the pop-up window, simply tap outside of it. Other cool functionality includes swiping up to dismiss the last notification and the ability to pin apps permanently to the halo. But what’s really most exciting is that team Paranoid Android‘s decided to make HALO open source so anyone can be involved. Check out the awesome demo video after the break.

Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Mobile, Samsung, Google, Facebook

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Via: xda-developers

Source: Paranoid Android (Google+)

Recently Facebook released version 6.0 of its mobile app for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. The new app brought over many features, including Chat Heads, which Facebook had shown off at the Home launch event. By default Chat Heads on iOS are limited to the Facebook app, they can’t pop up anywhere in iOS because of the way Apple’s mobile platform sandboxes apps, this is not the case with Android. However jailbreak tweak developers are known to circumvent many restrictions imposed by Apple, so now there’s a tweak which lets Chat Heads to pop up anywhere in iOS, allowing using to continue chatting with their friends without opening the Facebook app.

The tweak has been developed by one Adam Bell, who is going to release it for free in Cydia by the end of this week. Despite the fact that Facebook app will be running in the background for Chat Heads to work, Adam says his tweak doesn’t drain battery life. He says it took him a couple of hours to make this tweak, the hardest part was to make Chat Heads render on top of everything else.

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Upset that you won’t be able to know the joys of your friends’ floating, disembodied heads on your screen, iPhone users? Fret no more, because while you won’t be getting the entire Facebook Home experience, the Chat Heads feature should be hitting iOS devices sometime later today. More »

Now you can get Chat Heads even if you don’t want the rest of Facebook Home.

One of the centerpieces of Facebook’s new interface are “chat heads,” Facebook’s vision for the way that we should do messaging. Sounds fun! But what are they, exactly? And will they really change how we communicate? More »