Supporting orientations for iPad apps

Q:  Which orientations should my iPad application support?

A: It is strongly recommended that your application support all orientations. This includes portrait, portrait upside-down, landscape left and landscape right.

If it is essential that your application run in only one orientation (for instance, portrait only), then you should:

• Launch in your supported orientation, regardless of the current device orientation.

• Avoid displaying any UI element that tells people to rotate the device.

• Support both variants of an orientation.

When you are writing your application, consider using UIKit's interface orientation macros. In your UIViewController class, you should implement

-(BOOL)shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)interfaceOrientation to return:

• UIInterfaceOrientationIsPortrait(interfaceOrientation) - if you support only portrait.

• UIInterfaceOrientationIsLandscape(interfaceOrientation) - if you support only landscape.

Listing 1  Using an orientation macro in a portrait-only application

- (BOOL)shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)interfaceOrientation {

    return UIInterfaceOrientationIsPortrait(interfaceOrientation);

}

For more information on orientation support, see the "Device Orientation Can Change" section on the iOS Human Interface Guidelines. See Q&A: Why won't my UIViewController rotate with the device? for possible reasons your view controller does not rotate.

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