Question

I created a subclass of UITabBarController, in order to hide tabBar and statusBar once in landscape mode. I successfully implemented the code to hide/show the tabBar, but the stausBar is driving me crazy. My current implementation works 100% but not for the first rotation, and I’m unable to figure out why.
The code is the following:

- (void)didRotateFromInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)fromInterfaceOrientation
{
  BOOL hide = (fromInterfaceOrientation == UIInterfaceOrientationPortrait || 
                         fromInterfaceOrientation == UIInterfaceOrientationPortraitUpsideDown);
  [[UIApplication sharedApplication] setStatusBarHidden:hide withAnimation:UIStatusBarAnimationNone];
  CGRect mainFrame = [[UIScreen mainScreen] applicationFrame];
  [self.view setFrame:mainFrame];
}

In practice the first time I rotate my iPhone, the statusBar is correctly hide, but the frame is not correct (it has the 20px gap on the top). If I return to the portrait view from here, the layout will restore as expected, if then I rotate in landscape for the second time it will finally works as desired (no bars, pixel perfect layout!)… and from this point I can rotate my device N times and the views will always be presented in the right way…
so, why the first time my code fails?!

Extra info you may need:

• root tab controllers are UINavigationControllers
• all my nested view controllers are properly configured to support orientation changes
• I’m testing using iOS 5

Answer 1

I can’t believe it, but the solution is really simple! I solved by moving setStatusBarHidden:withAnimation: from didRotate… to willRotate…, the implementation is the following:

- (void)willRotateToInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)toInterfaceOrientation duration:(NSTimeInterval)duration
{
  BOOL show = (toInterfaceOrientation == UIInterfaceOrientationPortrait || 
                 toInterfaceOrientation == UIInterfaceOrientationPortraitUpsideDown);
  [[UIApplication sharedApplication] setStatusBarHidden:!show withAnimation:UIStatusBarAnimationNone];
}

In my case there is no need to hardcoding the new frame, since my views make use of autoresize masks… the view will be rendered properly automagically by UIKit… AWESOME 🙂

… +1 to virushuo for citing willRotateToInterfaceOrientation (which I was not taking into account)