Question

So my iPhone application currently has a tabviewcontroller that populates the entire screen. The app only runs in portrait mode. My task has been to detect device orientation changes, and once it changes to landscape, have a new uiview populate the entire screen.

I already have the device orientation change detection working. I’ve used an NSNotificationCenter to successfully call a helper method, deviceOrientationChanged, once an orientation change is detected. IF the change was to landscape mode, I run a certain block of code.

In this block of code I have already tried various things, none of which are successful. Simply saying self.view = newViewThing; does not work because the statusbar is still present at the top and the tabs are still present at the bottom.
I have also tried adding this newViewThing as a subview to the UIWindow. This did not work because while the view was added, it was not oriented correctly.

THE QUESTION IS: is there a way to load an entirely new uiview once a device orientation change is detected? Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Yes, there is a way to load a new view. I make it in my app that way:

- (void)orientationChanged:(NSNotification *)notification
{
    // We must add a delay here, otherwise we'll swap in the new view
    // too quickly and we'll get an animation glitch
    [self performSelector:@selector(updateLandscapeView) withObject:nil afterDelay:0];
}

- (void)updateLandscapeView
{
    UIDeviceOrientation deviceOrientation = [UIDevice currentDevice].orientation;
    if (UIDeviceOrientationIsLandscape(deviceOrientation) && !isShowingLandscapeView)
    {
        [self presentModalViewController:self.landscapeView animated:YES];
        isShowingLandscapeView = YES;
    }
    else if (deviceOrientation == UIDeviceOrientationPortrait && isShowingLandscapeView)
    {
        [self dismissModalViewControllerAnimated:YES];
        isShowingLandscapeView = NO;
    }    
}

And also I have added this code to viewDidLoad:

[[UIDevice currentDevice] beginGeneratingDeviceOrientationNotifications];
[[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:self selector:@selector(orientationChanged:)
                                             name:UIDeviceOrientationDidChangeNotification object:nil];

and this code to dealloc:

[[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] removeObserver:self];
[[UIDevice currentDevice] endGeneratingDeviceOrientationNotifications];