Objective-c – Programmatically change view orientation without rotating ipad

Jeremy Keith (@adactio) has a good solution for this on his blog Orientation and scale

Keep the Markup scalable by not setting a maximum-scale in markup.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

Then disable scalability with javascript on load until gesturestart when you allow scalability again with this script:

if (navigator.userAgent.match(/iPhone/i) || navigator.userAgent.match(/iPad/i)) {
    var viewportmeta = document.querySelector('meta[name="viewport"]');
    if (viewportmeta) {
        viewportmeta.content = 'width=device-width, minimum-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, initial-scale=1.0';
        document.body.addEventListener('gesturestart', function () {
            viewportmeta.content = 'width=device-width, minimum-scale=0.25, maximum-scale=1.6';
        }, false);
    }
}

Update 22-12-2014:
On an iPad 1 this doesnt work, it fails on the eventlistener. I've found that removing .body fixes that:

document.addEventListener('gesturestart', function() { /* */ });

You have to add the supportedDeviceOrientations to your "myApp.plist" .

Click on this list, add the key "Supported interface orientations" and add the supported interface orientations. This solved the problem for me.

For further informationen follow this link and go to the section "The Application Bundle": http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/General/Conceptual/iPadProgrammingGuide/CoreApplication/CoreApplication.html