Ubuntu Touch is an operating system that uses Unity 8 as the desktop environment and it's designed to run on mobile devices like phones and tablets, at least for now. With some small trickery, you can make it run its apps in separate and floating windows, just like on a desktop. Let me repeat that, like on a desktop.

Canonical has been following this notion of convergence and it's all good on paper, but people want to see it in action. As a matter of fact, there are some Ubuntu Touch apps that can run on the desktop, but users can do a much cooler thing than that. They can make their mobile phones running Ubuntu Touch display the windows of apps.

It looks really strange and I can't see any kind of useful application for this feature, although I'm sure that some of you will be much better at this game. The simple fact that you can do it shows just how close Ubuntu Touch is to the Ubuntu desktop.

Hacking Ubuntu Touch to do this is quite easy

Canonical's Michael Zanetti has a very interesting blog post regarding this feature, but he warns that it's experimental and that it might not be available for too long.

"I've received requests from people asking how to try the windowed mode on their unity8 enabled devices (yes phones too). While this currently works on phones too, there’s the issue that the window’s title bar is hiding behind the panel so you can’t really drag the windows around. Start the gallery-app to get around that. On larger screens, the panel should allow you dragging windows from there too," wrote Michael Zanetti on his blog.

All you need to do this is a Nexus 4 and the latest development image of Ubuntu Touch. It's easy to install and you might end up seeing something that is too interesting to put into words.