I disagree with johndb on his evaluation of Standout vs Tooleap. Here is mine:
- StandOut is a lot more flexible as you can create windows wherever you want. Tooleap has two objects: floating notifications and miniApps.
- StandOut requires a lot more code to acheive the same effect as Tooleap. Choose your pick on what kind of floating app you need.
- StandOut is a lot finicky, and requires some interesting workarounds to achieve simple things (like longpress). It requires you to get things right, the flags etc, otherwise it doesnt behave the way you want it to. It is hard to master. Tooleap on the other hand is ridiculously easy to code for.
- Finally, this pertains to both StandOut and Tooleap, they are both restricted in what they can do. There are some things I found I could not do with Standout which forced me to abandon it. There is no more active development on it, no new features can be added and no bugs can be fixed anymore. In Tooleap, while things are in the hands of the Tooleap developers on how they develop/restrict it, atleast it is in active development.
Hi everyone,
Very interesting discussion.
Just adding my opinion into the mix, although it's a little biased
Tooleap and Standout are basically two different multitasking solutions:
Always on top - In Tooleap, the only thing that is always on top, is the small floating bubble, which you can use to open a side-screen with mini app. With Standout, an entire window is always on top.
Notifications System - Tooleap comes with a built-in notifications system, which you can use as a replacement to standard android notifications. The user can view your app content with only a single click on the bubble, instead of two clicks (one click to open the notification drawer and another to open the notification). Standout does not have a built-in notification system.
Ease of development - With Tooleap, you only need to provide the SDK with a standard Android Activity, and we do the rest. Standout requires a lot of tinkering and coding to get results.
Customization - Tooleap main components are a floating bubble and side-screen with mini apps. All customization options revolves around that. As development progresses, we will add more customization options. Standout is an open source library, so basically you can add whatever customization options you like, if you have the time and skill.
With Tooleap, we tried to develop a multitasking solution which we feel is more suitable to a small device screen (although we do work on tablets). We think multi-windowed solutions (like Standout or Samsung Galaxy split screen) don't fit very well with smartphones screens, as every inch of the screen is important.
In the end, its all a matter of preference. We have a lot of respect for the Standout library, and we think it does an excellent job. We wanted to provide a solution that is easier to integrate, and fits better with small device screens.
Danny
