I love Google, and I am always excited by the products the release. However, I am never impressed with what they release. They create interesting tools and products, but the execution is always sub-par. And their product launches make it apparent that they’re a large collection of engineers with too few designers. But at times they miss the boat completely. For instance, the Google API presumes you will only turn your phone counter-clock wise and never clockwise. I am impressed with the Android platform. But there is no excuse for an idiotic oversight like this. This is an arbitrary restriction that hinders user experience.

If you turn the phone clockwise, Android’s native menus and text will appear upside down. I’ve seen a few applications that do a good decent job of letting you turn the phone clockwise, such as the game Bebbled (a good game by the way), but call up a menu in this position and you’ll see upside-down menus.

I am beta testing Super GNES application for the Android platform. Before I continue, let me say the developers are doing a great job with the project. Now on to the part where Google failed to have foresight. You can play Super GNES in portrait mode or landscape. On the G1 I prefer landscape as it puts the trackball under your right thumb, and your left hand is free to mash the keyboard. But every video game controller since the NES has put the direction pad under your left thumb.

A more natural setup for playing the emulator would be a rotating the phone in to landscape mode clockwise. It would put the trackball under the left thumb, place the volume buttons on the top side of the phone to become the left and right shoulder buttons easily accessible by the index finger of your right hand, and your right thumb could use the onscreen A,B,X,Y buttons.

I asked the SuperGNES dev team about exploring this orientation, and here is the teams:

“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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