[IPhone] Launching your Application in Landscape

Introduction
Applications on iPhone OS normally launch in portrait mode to match the orientation of the Home screen. However, many applications for iPhone and iPod touch are better suited to landscape mode. If you have an application that runs in landscape mode only, you must implement several steps to make it initially launch in the desired orientation. This document covers this topic in detail, including the caveats so that apps running on all versions of the iPhone OS can function properly. In this particular example, the targeted application it intended to support only UIInterfaceOrientationLandscapeRight.

Interface Orientation and Status Bar
In your application’s "Info.plist" file, add the following key/value:
UIInterfaceOrientation
UIInterfaceOrientationLandscapeRight
The UIInterfaceOrientation key provides a hint to iPhone OS that it should set the orientation of the application status bar (if one is displayed) to the specified orientation at launch time. Using this key is similar to calling the setStatusBarOrientation:animated: method of UIApplication early in the execution of your applicationDidFinishLaunching: method.

UIViewController Delegate
If you manage your views with a UIViewController, be sure to implement theshouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation: method:
(BOOL)shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)interfaceOrientation;
Listing 1: Ensuring that landscape right orientation is maintained

- (BOOL)shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)interfaceOrientation
{
  return (interfaceOrientation == UIInterfaceOrientationLandscapeRight);
}

UIViewController's View
Property
If you are using Interface Builder to lay out
your views, you can either size your views as landscape, for example a
full screen view would have a width of 480 and height of 320, or you can
lay out your views in portrait mode and let the view autoresizing
behavior adjust the layout for you.
When rotating the design surface
from portrait to landscape mode, Interface Builder respects the
autoresizing behaviors set for each view and adjusts their position on
the design surface. You can therefore test the behavior of your views
inside Interface Builder before loading them into your application.
Regardless of how you orient
the design surface in Interface Builder, remember that nib files
themselves have no concept of interface orientation.
iPhone OS Version 2.1 and
Later
If you are developing an application running version
2.1 or later and uses view controllers, you are essentially finished at
this point.


iPhone OS Version 2.0
In
version 2.0, assigning a value to the UIInterfaceOrientation key
affects only the status bar's orientation, and does not affect the
orientation of your views or your default launch image. The dimensions
of a view do not determine its orientation at load time. Views are
always loaded and displayed in portrait mode. It is up to you to rotate
your views to the appropriate orientation after they are loaded. When
you do this depends on how you construct your application. If you
construct your application using view controllers, you can perform this
operation in the viewDidLoad: method of your view controller objects. If
you are not using view controllers, you can perform it in
the applicationDidFinishLaunching:method after creating your views or
after loading them from a nib file.
To display your views in
landscape mode at launch time, you must manually rotate its coordinate
system 90 degrees to the appropriate landscape orientation.
IMPORTANT: These steps are
needed only if you intend to run your application in landscape mode all
the time. If you are creating an application that can toggle between
landscape and portrait modes, your application should launch in portrait
mode and then use the built-in view controller support to rotate its
interface as needed.
View
Rotation using Transforms
The default view coordinate
system assumes a portrait orientation. To launch in landscape, you have
to change the orientation of your view, and the way you do this is by
modifying the view's affine transform. Translating a view shifts all its
subviews.
After your views are loaded into memory, you need to
reorient them to landscape mode by doing the following:
Find the center point of your
application’s content area.
Rotate your views 90 degrees around that
center point.
The exact center point of your application’s
content area can vary and is dependent on your interface design.
Applications that do not display the status bar or applications that
display a translucent status bar typically have a content area that
matches the screen bounds. Applications that display an opaque status
bar typically have a content area that does not include the area
occupied by the status bar. This latter scenario is more common and is
also a little more challenging to implement correctly. As a result, the
rest of this Tech Note shows you how to perform a rotation on an
interface that uses an opaque status bar.
When your landscape view is
loaded from its nib file, its center point is initially set to match
the center point of the screen, as shown in the Figure below:
“Coordinates used when laying out content in landscape mode”. Because
the view in the example does not occupy the area under the status bar,
however, the initial center point is incorrect. To find the correct
center point, you can use the location and size of the status bar to aid
your computations. The status bar’s height represents the width of the
landscape-oriented content area. Similarly, the status bar’s x-origin
represents the height of the landscape-oriented content area. Using
these values along with the origin point of (0, 0), you can compute the
correct center point of the content area and use that value to
reposition your view before applying a rotation transform.
Figure
1: Coordinates used when laying out content in landscape mode.
The Listing below "Reorienting a view to landscape mode”
shows the viewDidLoad: method of a controller object whose views are
oriented for landscape mode at launch. As previously described, this
method uses the height and x-origin of the status bar to compute the
center point of the landscape-oriented content area. It then shifts the
center of the portrait-oriented view to that location and rotates the
view into the proper orientation.


// Reorienting a
view to landscape mode.

- (void)viewDidLoad { [super viewDidLoad]; if ([[UIDevice currentDevice].systemVersion floatValue] < 2.1) { UIInterfaceOrientation orientation = [[UIApplication sharedApplication] statusBarOrientation]; if (orientation == UIInterfaceOrientationLandscapeRight) { CGAffineTransform transform = self.view.transform; // use the status bar frame to determine the center point of the window's content area. CGRect statusBarFrame = [[UIApplication sharedApplication] statusBarFrame]; CGRect bounds = CGRectMake(0, 0, statusBarFrame.size.height, statusBarFrame.origin.x); CGPoint center = CGPointMake(bounds.size.height / 2.0, bounds.size.width / 2.0); // set the center point of the view to the center point of the window's content area. self.view.center = center; // Rotate the view 90 degrees around its new center point. transform = CGAffineTransformRotate(transform, (M_PI / 2.0)); self.view.transform = transform; } } }

From Technical Note TN2244Launching your Application in Landscape