I am recreating the Camera app interface for my iPhone app. When it is rotated on its side, instead of rotating the entire UI, I only rotate the icons, just like the normal camera app does. This has worked just fine, but with iOS 5 the notification center orientation depends on the app’s orientation. Since my app technically stays in portrait orientation, you can only access the notification center from the top of the screen, even when held sideways. The default camera app has somehow avoided this problem.
I figured the best way to do this is to silently update the UI to be in a different orientation, but from the user’s perspective only the icons update. I’ve tried to achieve this by returning YES in shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation:, and then setting the transform property to rotate the view in willAnimateRotationToInterfaceOrientation:duration:. This works, except it shows an animation where it moves the newly rotated view to its proper position. How can I achieve this without any visible animation?
The answer is actually very simple. All I had to do was change the statusBarOrientation property on [UIApplication sharedApplication] to whatever UIInterfaceOrientation I wanted.