ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Kevin Gunn <kevin.gunn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,
You may recall some time back I sent out a call for testing on the "full
shell rotation" feature for Unity8. We are on the verge of landing this
feature in vivid.

I also want to highlight to any application developers that along with this
change, applications will rotate in all orientations by default. We've
performed quite a bit of testing (~125) of the applications in our store
and for the most part, ~80% of the applications rotated and could be used
with no user experience problems. The remaining ~20% had what I would call
less than optimal experiences in the landscape orientation. To say another
way, these applications were built assuming a fixed portrait orientation of
a certain size. The most common example of this were an applications
containing a button located on the display in the portrait mode. The button
would then be located off the screen in landscape and the application did
not permit scrolling to allow the user to interact. As a solution, these
applications could either be fixed to portrait, or possibly improved to
make the application more usable in the landscape mode. For those
interested in seeing how their application behaves ahead of this feature
landing, simply follow the instruction at
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Unity8/FullShellRotation
You may also see which applications we've tested via the link under the
"Applications Tested".

It's important to note in all cases tested where the landscape orientation
was not ideal for the application, the phone could simply be reorientated
back to portrait with application following suit with no impact on the
user's application experience. This means that for this 20% of
applications, addressing rotation is strongly suggested for the user
experience, but not mandatory.

We are asking application developers to add this orientation preference
today, if desired, ahead of this feature landing. We estimate landing in
about 2 to 3 weeks. There is no impact to applications by adding this
orientation preference ahead of shell rotation feature landing. To express
a preferred orientation with the new shell rotation feature, simply add
either of the following to the application's desktop file
   X-Ubuntu-Supported-Orientations=landscape
or
   X-Ubuntu-Supported-Orientations=portrait

And of course, you can test the results of this change on the ppa in the
aforementioned wiki.

If there is no orientation preference, no modification is needed and the
application will simply support all orientations.

Hope this helps.
Questions welcome.
br,kg