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Appy life

Screen orientation is an important aspect of mobile devices. In earlier devices, it did not matter. Whether you held your phone straight or rotated, the screen would always be really small.

Now in the days of 5, 6 inch screens and phablets, your portrait and landscape orientation makes a lot of difference. You can read much longer lines in landscape, but fewer lines before you have to scroll.

Now when you rotate the screen, the contents of the screen rotate. Not happening in your phone? You need to pull down the menu from top of mobile screen. The same menu, used to put phones in silent mode. Yes, that menu has an option for automatic screen rotation. You should enable it. You did not know that? Your child/grand child will be very angry when teaching you mobile.

But once you enable auto rotation, you have another problem. You are watching some Ted video. On the bed. Either because you want to put yourself to sleep or you feel you are genius if you watch youtube videos instead of TV. So turn to your side, your screen changes to landscape. You try seeing it in landscape by rotating it a little. It changes again back to portrait. This happens for a while. Then you decide to let your phone dictate how to twist your neck.

But what about the poor developers? How do they handle screen rotation? You think the software already has everything, they just ctrl c and ctrl v. How I wish that was true!

Some tell us we can not use their app in portrait mode. That is justifiable. You can not play many games - (angry bird!) in narrow portrait mode. So the developer will just write orientation = landscape. Done. Finito.

But not all apps are angry bird. So we mortals try to be flexible and give the users the freedom to rotate the screen as they want. And the game restarts. Yes, if the app developer does not write proper code, every time you rotate the screen, the game will restart. And imagine your anger if you are in 12th level and you show off to your friend by giving him the mobile. And the in the process, screen is rotated and game goes back to level 0. Rage, immediate uninstall, angry review.

So poor developer does not want all this. He tries to save your game by saving state of the game when there is configuration change. Easier said than done.

I am not saying writing a mobile app is more difficult than let us say designing a beautiful house or performing a cardiac surgery. But it is difficult.

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