![]() ![]() Justifiably recognised by Apple in its Best of 2013 awards, Badland is the perfect game to get stuck into over Christmas: a platform-adventure set in an eerie forest, with beautiful visuals, slick physics and plenty of exploration. This time round, you could play as both sides, and there's a range of Telepods toys that interact with the game too, Skylanders-style. This was the second Angry Birds game to be set in the Star Wars universe, with characters turned into birds and pigs, and 120 levels to fling them through. ![]() Photograph: PR ACTION Angry Birds Star Wars II How? By sending emails, submitting bug tickets, leaving 1-star reviews, and generally harassing and shaming those who are too lazy, too ignorant, or for whatever reason deny that screen rotation is a thing, and they need to get with the times and update their apps to support it.Īnd while they’re at it, why not support tablet-sized displays, too? Apps designed for a phone, when seen on a 9-inch screen just make them look unprofessional – and embarrassing.Nimble Quest. Only end-users can put pressure on developers and software shops that don’t let their apps rotate. What’s the solution? Alas, it’s not an easy one. (Now, of course, we have a whole new set of problems with Java. Thankfully, the ways contemporary programmers use Java has broken us out of the “everything looks the same, and everything looks stupid” rut that hampered app development back in the day. The “write once, run anywhere” approach led to a generation of apps that looked terrible, and didn’t run in nearly as many places as the catchy tagline implied. Java attempted to address this issue years and years ago. Instead of designing each page-type in an application for “every” resolution, app designers need to think like web designers – letting their designs stretch and compress, resize, and even reflow when the screen size changes. To be frank, they’re right – but it underscores the fact that they’re doing it wrong. The problem with apps comes when designers think there are “too many” resolutions to design for – and that adding both landscape and portrait orientations doubles that number. This sort of endeavor requires a lot of planning, time, and testing – but it’s not impossible: just look at how many responsive websites exist today. ![]() I understand the time and effort that goes into web designs and the underlying code required to realize those designs in a handful of browsers on several operating systems and in who knows how many screen sizes and resolutions. Everything (even launchers) work correctly in landscape mode on tablets, so why are there some apps apps that refuse to rotate – or force you to rotate to your non-preferred layout? Laziness, Ignorance, and Denial On smartphones this behavior is just frustrating, but on tablets, it’s insane. That’s when something interesting began to happen: some apps started refusing to rotate – forcing users to use them in whatever orientation the developer hard-coded the app to use (which was usually portrait). Phones with hardware keyboards were becoming much harder to find at that point, and on-screen keyboards were getting bigger and easier to use anyway. After that I went back to portrait-first. ![]() It took a little getting used to, but for the most part, it worked, and worked well – until Google stopped letting its launcher rotate. I was replying so frequently (and incurring the second or so of lag while the stuff on the screen rotated) that I even went as far as setting my default screen orientation to landscape, turning off auto-rotation completely.įor months I used my phone entirely in landscape mode. Every time I wanted to reply to an email, send a text, or post an update, I’d pop out the keyboard, wait while the screen rotated, and then start clacking away on the itty-bitty keys. The T-Mobile G2 had a keyboard/screen layout that was similar to the G1. My first Android-powered smartphone was the T-Mobile G1, which had a flip-around screen covering its keyboard. Then again, there are some apps that simply don’t rotate – at all. ![]()
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