Google – Missing the Point Once Again
Posted on October 11th, 2009 in Android, Bugs, Coding, Game, Review, Software, Tech | No Comments »
I love Google and am always excited by the products they release, but I am never impressed with what they release. You can tell they’re a covey of engineers in dire need of UI/UX help, and often they overlook obvious features.
Currently I’m thrilled to be beta testing the Super GNES application for Android.The developers are putting in a lot of time and it shows. But here is an interesting limitation the team has run in to that seems to be just piss-poor planning by Google:
You can play Super GNES in portrait mode or in landscape. Landscape mode is good, and it puts the trackball, which serves as the direction pad, under your right thumb. This isn’t a problem, but we all grew up with the direction pad under our left hand. And trying to control all of the A,B,X,Y, left shoulder, and right shoulder buttons from the keypad or the on-screen controls doesn’t create the strongest experience.
A more natural setup would be a landscape mode that places the trackball on the left side of the screen. And even better, the volume buttons along the left hand-side of the phone would now become the left and right shoulder buttons.
But Google presumed this…
“If someone has their phone in portrait mode, they will only ever place it in landscape mode by turning it 90-degrees counter-clockwise.”
That is right. Android, for all intents and purposes, can only be rotated one direction. There is no excuse for this kind of incompetence, especially if they’re hoping to ever challenge more dominant platforms such as the iPhone.
Here is a quote from the SuperGNES thread on exploring this orientation:
There doesn’t appear to be a good way to orient the screen landscape
with the track ball on the left. I even took a tour through the
android framework source code to see if I could hack something
together but wasn’t able to find anything. I can manually orient the
screen but stuff like the menu and settings have the wrong orientation
which is frustrating to use.
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Be careful with your selection, basically you’re going from “hostname=” until the first encounter of “></param>”. From this code we need the part the looks like this: