Programming the iPhone User Experience

Spin Zone

At some point in the development lifecycle of an iPhone application, a developer must decide how to handle support for rotation of the device. The basics of rotation support are very simple, though each view in each application has different, often complicated, considerations. How will interface elements scale? How will typography react? How should content react when the rectangle defining its boundaries changes dimensions and orientation?

Some developers choose to ignore rotation events, keeping the orientation of their application pinned to the screen and non-reactive to changes in the device. They always have the option to enhance the application at a later date, should users request rotation support. Other developers implement full rotation support, with rich animation and intuitive layout responses that keep their application usable from any angle. Both of these options contribute to a reliable user experience.

The spin zone anti-pattern occurs when an application implements rotation support in an ad-hoc fashion. For example, perhaps the application supports rotation only in one direction—90 degrees clockwise but not counterclockwise. Another example of the anti-pattern is arbitrarily—from the point of view of the user—supporting rotation for different screens. Worse still is requiring rotation for some screens, but not others.

The reasons that partial rotation support is damaging to the user experience aren’t mysterious. If a user has to constantly check whether ...