Hi
With the most recent update, the interface including icons have changed but there are some changes that seem strange to me.
- Home screen will not turn to landscape mode
- Recommendations - portrait only
- Search- portrait only
- My Week- portrait only
- TV Guide- portrait only
- New Series - portrait and landscape
- Manages Series - portrait and landscape
- Most Popular - portrait and landscape
- Settings - portrait and landscape
Also, the Recommendations images seem to be cropped with a person's head often cut off at the eyes etc.
Using Nexus 9 on Nougat
Regards
Greg
I'm not sure what the rationale is for which screens in the app can be flipped between portrait and landscape, but the restriction on portrait-only in 2.20 and later is because in previous versions, when Recommended was flipped to landscape, the image width was increased to the phone's landscape width, but the image height and aspect ratio was kept the same. That meant that the top and bottom of the image was cropped in landscape, but not in portrait (which may be what you meant in the last para).
The fix to that problem was to restrict Recommended to portrait. It's perhaps not what I might have done, but I don't know anything about the internals, so there may have been compelling reasons to do it that way.
"Help and About" can also be portrait and landscape.
There also seem to be some issues with Recommended image aspect ratios in the current app (2.26) compared to the image aspect ratios in the "What's On" emails. A good example is the Recommended image for Sound Of Music, where the image is stretched a bit horizontally compared to the image for the same movie in "What's On" (where the aspect ratio looks OK). There seemed to be some other aspect ratio differences between the app and this weekend's "What's On", but they seemed less obvious than for Sound Of Music.
We had a few crashes specifically in landscape mode, this should hopefully be a temporary situation and we can then re-enable landscape in a future update.
The only part of the app I ever use in landscape are YouTube trailers which will be fixed too. The app was really designed to be held in the hand in the normal way hence portrait which is especially evident in the TV Guide and related list pages where landscape is not useful.
The app was really designed to be held in the hand in the normal way hence portrait
I can understand this for a phone but using a tablet seems more natural in landscape.
Greg
...which is why we have never done a tablet version! We've considered it many times but the % of tablet users is tiny and tablets themselves have, at best, a static market. To do a proper tablet redesign is simply too expensive for our small company, and with limited return. The idea of the app being for a smartphone is "in your pocket convenience", though plus sized phones have somewhat confused that original "pocket" idea from the iPhones 3,4 and 5 etc!