Written by dgoldring on Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Free for All: TaskFacade (for Windows Mobile)

One of the real attractions of Windows Mobile has always been its ability to multi-task. It can numerous programs at once. Now, we will ignore the obvious issues in the underlying system, such as memory management and the much maligned “X” button which minimizes instead of closing. The most obvious problem for me has always been Windows Mobile’s lack of an easy to access task manager. I mean, really, what is the point of multi-tasking if you cannot quickly and easily switch from one task to another.

Some third party applications, such as HTC (above) have offered numerous options for fixing this problem. All of these, however, have been surprisingly similar, relying on a text based menu dropping out of the upper right hand corner of the screen. Frankly, I think we deserve more and better options.

Enter TaskFacade. Now this is what I think should have been included with Windows Mobile, but wasn’t (fortunately, it is a free download). When you launch the program (I recommend mapping it to a button for easy access), it takes you to a simple, tiled screen, with a tile representing each running program. The cool thing here is that the tiles will resize, based upon how many programs you have running, so that they will all fit on the same screen.

Just tap the tile representing the program you want to access to open that window. Pretty easy to use so far. Tap and hold on any tile to select it, or tap the background to open the menu.

From the menu, you can select process to hide or close the program. Select menu to access additional options, layouts, and themes. In fact, there are four themes included in this program: Classic, Gloss, MacOS, and Yellow. Or, you can enter edit mode to create your own theme.

I thought this was a great program, and a fantastic addition to your Windows Mobile device. It adds some much needed functionality to the operating system, and does it in a way which is easy to access and control.

You can download it free, here.

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