Review: Orbit

From the creator of the first iPhone game; Lights Off, the new popular Stacks.app, here comes again, to bring Mac OS X back to the iPhone, Steven Troughton-Smith, feautring Orbit.

The idea for Orbit comes from this Exposé concept for the iPhone, which what bascially does is making multitasking on iPhone easier by not draging as we usually do to navigate between screens, but tapping on the one you desire.

This is one of the few ideas I say, why, but why does Apple doesn’t include this needed UI changes between big releases (e.g. 3.0) and why the heck does any “great” developer puts their hands on the concept. Just imagine Mac OS X without Expose! Boring isn’t it? I use it every minute since it was introduced in the OS X family. Well, there is people who is different in making stuff happen and thank God, Steven makes part of this group.

Let’s go on with the review…

So, as you can see, what you do is to press the Orbit icon and you see a quick view of your home screens, then you can select one and  it will take you to that screen with a nice animation. No need of scrolling or dragging of home screens.

Orbit support unlimited screens because, by itself, when the screen is full it makes an automatic black slider so you see your other screens. Of course, the iPhone DOES has a limited screen quantity of screens supported.

This app in my experience is a dream come true. And yes, it sounds cliche, but what it does best is that it improves your iPhone workflow in an elegant way (thing that I expected from Spotlight Search, but writing the app name and the whole keyboard process is just not fast enough).

The app also offers caching of your home screens, so just the first time it launches it will take like 1 second per screen to load its preview, after that is automatic and fast.

The only inconvenience for me is the lack of this app in the use of multitasking. I just can’t multitask when the icon is sitted on my home screen only. Users need to take advantage of this app by, let’s say, been surfing the web or playing a game in the iPhone and call Orbit to take a note or play another game in another whole different screen.

There’s several solutions I tried, one was with SBSettings (on its dock) but it was too painfully slow. Custom HomeButton is another app for that, you can assign the double home pressing to any app. Problem is that it didn’t work at all with the app. Just showed the screen black and returned me to the home screen. UPDATE: Steven is working with the developer to ensure his app works with Custom HomeButton. He says is their fault.

So , in conclusion, with everything Orbit offers, I will suggest for those that haven’t jailbreak your iPhones, do it now and download it right now from Cydia, is $1.99 for future development and Steven dog’s food. There’s nothing bad this app can do for you. It’s more than worth the price for all the saved time you’ll get.

-FCA

UPDATE: Turn out there’s a new interesting way of approaching multitasking, via pinching, and it may or may not come in the next version of Orbit, here’s a demo:

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