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Comment by zefhous | Hacker News Reader

Not a great first experience on the iPad for me.

1. Launch app in landscape. Oh, I guess they don't support landscape orientation for signing it. That's annoying.

2. Change orientation to portrait and sign in.

3. A dialog requesting to send push notifications appears — in landscape orientation (http://cl.ly/image/2t2P0X3f2H2Z) — but I'm still holding it in portrait and the rest of the UI is in portrait as well.

4. I have to step through a bunch of screens that I just went through when I signed in on my iPhone. These are not related to local settings, but to my Google account. Why do I have to go through these again?

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That screenshot you show would surely be an iOS issue, not an app-specific one?

I think their app isn't handling orientation changes properly. I signed out and tried it again and I can consistently reproduce the bug.

If I am signed out, the app will never launch in landscape orientation. If I am already in landscape orientation, I can sign out and see the login screen in landscape as I should. However as soon as I rotate to portrait, I can no longer get back to landscape.

As an iOS developer, this definitely seems like a problem with the app itself and I've not experienced this elsewhere.

It's an app-specific problem. This is most likely due to an improperly implemented handler for orientation change events - if the currently displayed View Controller does not respond to the correct config callbacks the OS can get into a state where it presumes an orientation mode is supported, but the UI itself is rendering in that orientation - and thus all OS-level UI will render rotated.

Now that Google is pushing Google+ even harder in everything new they launch.. I just wish Google would somehow make it possible to merge two Google Apps accounts into one public Google+ account. Now I have to manage multiple Google+ which makes me feel a little schizophrenic and it's confusing to other people who aren't sure on which account to connect with me. It's getting messy.

I successfully merged my Google Apps Google+ account with my regular Google+ account. Have you tried this?

https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1716102?hl=en&top...

To be fair to Google, Apple did break rotation in lots of apps in iOS 6. Though the fix isn't that difficult and I'm surprised that new releases are running into this.

The Hangouts app is iOS 6.1 only.

I deleted it after I found out it requires you to have a Google+ account. I guess I shouldn't have had my hopes up considering it's called Hangouts.

Yeah, they can't seriously expect to compete with FaceTime and Skype adoption rates if they continue trying to force users to engage with their terrible social feature crap just because they want to make video calls.

Then again, Google's playing a very long game here with Plus (and Android, and self-driving cars, and a zillion other things). Who knows if it'll work out in the end. What I do know today is that it's rather annoying.

I'd just like to be able to vidchat with friends from my chromebook without having to get all my friends to fuck up their youtube accounts.

Can you make Skype calls without a Skype account?

FaceTime requires an Apple ID and Skype requires a Skype account, so I'm confused, how is requiring a G+ account any different?

Google+ wants to integrate everything and that can cause problems if you use their services for important things. I'm still refusing to link my primary gmail address with a Google+ account after the big issue with name verification. My name is very unamerican so until I move everything important off of gmail, I won't join g+.

I know they promised not to do that anymore, but they hold too much data right now to trust them without any access to support.

You seem to have the workaround already, though: make a separate account. I'm not going to argue that it's a good thing that you need to do that, but it doesn't seem worse than having to e.g. sign up for a separate Skype account to use Skype.

Agree w/ mikeash

In that both of those are fire and forget, whereas your Google/G+ account is used for tons of stuff people don't really like but are shoved into their throats.

I already had a google ID. Signing up to Hangout asked for Google+ registration, forces to set the public name of the base account and forces activation of Picasa. I actually bailed out of each of these steps once, just to check that it won't sign up without all of these.

Comparing it to skype, I actually have two skype accounts, one "public" for friends and work related things, and set on my workstation, and an obscure private one that only a few family members see, set on y phone. Having the same set up for Hangout would feel like a nightmare with all the related services entangled, switching signups even to look at pictures etc.

I do a lot of video calls with startup founders and other startup investors in and out of the Valley. YMMV but my breakdown is probably 95% Hangout, 3% Skype and 2% Facetime/GoToMeeting/Other.

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