Even before Apple added landscape view to all its key apps, developers had already begun the landscape revolution. Landscape is one of the greater innovations of the iPhone user experience, which detects device orientation to present information accordingly. However there’s a time and place for landscape, and mostly a portrait orientation works best. I mean, how many times have you wished the iPod’s Coverflow view could be disabled? Landscape takes up extra pixels for the menubar and tab bar, and in some cases, everything. Here are some thoughts the landscape views of apps I’ve used on my iPhone.
Landscape not needed
First, is landscape where not needed. It’s especially annoying when you’re trying to use the iPhone while lying down. You have to hold the iPhone awkwardly, which I’m sure is not helping out your wrist injury. The Facebook app for instance doesn’t require a landscape view for the news feeds, least of all friends lists. Selective landscape views, like with the Tweetie 2 compose window only mode is the best way to go. Personally I don’t know why Brichter built in the ‘full landscape mode’ and made that the default. While you can control the amount of landscape in Tweetie 2, some of the apps don’t even have a setting to turn it off. NetNewsWire, Facebook, all feature in this category of forced landscape. My point is, that some apps don’t need landscape, so adding it in only makes it a negative feature. And if you do feel the need to add landscape, make sure there’s a way to turn it off.
Best case: So many apps which don’t have landscape. They could easily have put in a landscape mode in there, but they didn’t. Because it’s not needed. Tweetie 2 is also a good example of landscape done well.
Of Landscape showing less instead of more
Second, is about laziness. And this laziness is instigated by Apple themselves. When a device turns into landscape, we expect to see equal or more information per pixel, definitely not less. If you rotate a mail message, it will zoom in to accommodate the predefined width of the paragraph, and not redraw the paragraph at the same font size. It effectively ‘zooms’ in to your text, making it big and useless. The SMS bubbles on the other hand refuse to make use of the extra available space on either sides. This is also true of Instapaper (and some other apps I can’t remember the names of). This makes the landscape mode utterly useless and a major annoyance. Luckily you can turn off landscape modes in most third party apps, but for Mail and SMS I’m stuck with holding the iPhone upright at all times. Making sure the content rescale is crucial to having a more useful landscape mode. So far RSS readers have exhibited this behaviour, and I’m hoping Apple’s apps follow suit.
Best case: NetNewsWire. Even the articles list rescales to show more content. The Stocks widget, Weightbot and a few others put an interesting twist on the landscape mode, as they change the entire view of what’s on screen. Documents To Go goes a step ahead and redraws the tab bar to show more controls.
Landscape settings are in the settings in the settings app
I hate the settings in the settings app. Makes absolutely no sense to quit an app just to toggle settings. Thankfully more and more apps are implementing settings within the UI, so turning landscape on/off is much easier. One innovation I’d like to point out, is Read it Later’s orientation lock feature. While you can choose to lock the orientation in the preferences, every time Read it Later does an orientation shift, it brings up a little lock icon in a HUD. Tapping this lock prevents the orientation from shifting. However, if the Read it Later detects a shift in orientation, it will bring up the unobtrusive lock in case you want to shift orientation; tap it and it’s unlocked. Very nicely implemented.
Best case: Read it Later, for the points mentioned above. Tweetie 2, for finally moving settings into the app itself.
Here’s a shout out to developers, for those who’re listening. Please give much thought to the landscape view before enabling it—is it a check mark in Xcode?—for there is much to consider on the user end. Most of the times it’s a non feature that display less content instead of more, and unless given much thought, is a feature best not implemented. At least that’s my opinion on the matter.
I frequently use landscape mode to get bigger fonts so I can read the text. I don’t find it useless to have a larger display at all. It actually is helpful to me when I have my contacts in and my far sightedness hits.
