Automatic orientation support for iPhone and iPad apps

Technical Q&A QA1588 Automatic orientation support for iPhone and iPad apps

Q: What is needed to automatically support multiple orientations in my iPhone and iPad apps? A: There are three things you must implement to automatically support orientations in your iPhone and iPad apps: provide launch images, update your Info.plist settings, and implement the -shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation: method. IMPORTANT: It is strongly recommended that your application support all orientations. This includes portrait, portrait upside-down, landscape left and landscape right. iPad apps that require an orientation must support both variants of that orientation. Provide Launch Images iPhone applications: You need one launch image in the PNG format. It must be 320 x 480 pixels and named Default.png. iPad applications: Create a launch image for each supported orientation in the PNG format. Each launch image must be 1004 x 768 pixels (for landscape) or 748 x 1024 pixels (for portrait). Default launch image files: Default-PortraitUpsideDown.png - upside-down portrait version. Default-LandscapeLeft.png - left-oriented landscape version. Default-LandscapeRight.png - right-oriented landscape version. Default-Portrait.png - generic portrait version. Default-Landscape.png - generic landscape version. Default.png - default portrait launch. Its usage is strongly discouraged, use more specific launch images instead. IMPORTANT: All file names are case sensitive. Note: It is common for an application to provide only Default-Portrait.png and Default-Landscape.png. More specific launch images will take precedence over the generic versions, for example Default-PortraitUpsideDown.png takes precedence over the Default-Portrait.png image file for this specific orientation. See the "Providing Launch Images for Different Orientations" section on the iPad Programming Guide for more information. Back to Top  Update Your Info.plist Settings In your Info.plist file: Specify values for the UISupportedInterfaceOrientations key for the supported orientations. Specify values for the UIInterfaceOrientation key for the initial launch orientation. Note: If you need to configure your iPad application differently from your iPhone application, you can specify device-specific values for Info.plist keys in iPhone OS 3.2 and later. See the "Creating a Universal Application" section in the iPad Programming Guide. Back to Top  Implement -shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation: Method In your UIViewController class, implement the -(BOOL)shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)interfaceOrientation method to return the supported UIInterfaceOrientation constants. This method should return YES to support all orientations. See Q&A: Supporting orientations for iPad apps for supporting orientations in iPad apps. See Q&A: Why won't my UIViewController rotate with the device? for possible reasons your view controller does not rotate.