Take

Odd

One of the things that rub me sideways about iPadOS or iOS or some of Apple's newer platforms is that there are always dozens of modes that you are supposed to support. Be it split view or scenes/windows or whatever, it shows up as some new abstraction that recontextualizes what's already there and sets some new parameter for how something works.

Maybe that's the only way it can happen, both in terms of introducing a new concept and allowing for the nitty-gritty details to work out in a sound way. But it still feels odd, most of the time. It feels like asking people to absorb additional layers of architecture all the time in some sort of endless layer cake, where perfection and "good citizenship" is only ever temporary, and you better have a lot of free time at your disposal. And if you're lucky, it gets announced ahead of time, and not just hotpatched into the GM seed when the latest device is announced.

Previous post: Retro Game Mechanics Explained Following post: Titles