iOS5, iOS6, rotation, event firing arbitrarily - ios

Question

I have an app that supports orientation changes and rotates accordingly. I listen to the event UIApplicationWillChangeStatusBarOrientationNotification. Now during the load of this app I add some views and set them up in my app, based on the current orientation.
in iOS 6, this works fine and the app responds and rotates properly, so the user can load in both landscape and portrait mode and code works fine.
in iOS 5, if I load the app in portrait mode, the app works fine, and once that load has been completed in portrait mode, and the UI is aligned and sized, it will respond to other orientation changes to landascape or portrait. The problem I have is this : When loading iOS 5 in landscape mode, and while physically laying the device with iOS 5 on a flat surface to ensure its landscape, I get a OrientationNotification that moves from Landscape to portrait ( although the device didn't change ).
So another device iOS 6 in the same experiment, loads properly and I don't get any weird events of rotation changes that didn't occur, but with iOS 5 I do get them!!
Any ideas?
I am supporting the orientation for both iOS's
- (BOOL)shouldAutorotate {
return YES;
}
- (BOOL)shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation:
(UIInterfaceOrientation)interfaceOrientation {
return (interfaceOrientation == UIInterfaceOrientationPortrait ||
interfaceOrientation == UIInterfaceOrientationLandscapeLeft ||
interfaceOrientation == UIInterfaceOrientationPortraitUpsideDown ||
interfaceOrientation == UIInterfaceOrientationLandscapeRight);
}

Answer 1

It sounds like iOS 5 believes things should be portrait if, in fact, there is no physical orientation (i.e. flat up or down) and iOS 6 doesn't. For what it might be worth, to determine the orientation to display stuff when it matters, I use the actual device orientation when available and the status bar orientation when the device is flat. For instance:
// Get a useful screen orientation.
// If the device is physically in portrait or landscape then
// that is the orientation.
// If it is not, then it is probably flat on a table and use
// the orientation of the status bar which should be set to
// the last physical orientation.
//
// screen Orientation
//------------------------------------------------------------
+ (UIDeviceOrientation) screenOrientation {
UIDeviceOrientation orientation = [[UIDevice currentDevice] orientation];
if (orientation!=UIInterfaceOrientationPortrait
&& orientation!=UIInterfaceOrientationPortraitUpsideDown
&& orientation!=UIInterfaceOrientationLandscapeLeft
&& orientation != UIInterfaceOrientationLandscapeRight) {
// Not known at this time. Use the status bar orientation
orientation = [[UIApplication sharedApplication] statusBarOrientation];
}
return orientation;
}
I'm not sure that helps you directly, but perhaps in your notification handler you could check to see what the actual status bar orientation is. Or maybe the timing of the notification and the status-bar orientation change doesn't make that work.