Starting in Landscape Mode without Status Bar

Here's another situation where the Simulator doesn't behave the same as the device. It's also something that's not well documented, so let's take a second to look at how to have an application start up in landscape mode without a status bar.

The first thing you have to do is open up Info.plist in your Xcode project. It will be in the Resources group. You need to add two entires. First, add an entry called UIInterfaceOrientation and assign it a value of UIInterfaceOrientationLandscapeRight. Second, ad another entry, and call it UIStatusBarHidden. When you add this row, it should change to a checkbox; make sure the box is checked.

Now, in your application delegate, find the method called applicationDidFinishLaunching:. In it, you need to add the following code, after the last line that's already there. The code you need to add should look like this:

 [[UIApplication sharedApplication] setStatusBarOrientation:UIInterfaceOrientationLandscapeRight animated:NO];
 
#if (TARGET_IPHONE_SIMULATOR)
 UIScreen *screen = [UIScreen mainScreen];
 viewController.view.bounds = CGRectMake(0, 0, screen.bounds.size.height, screen.bounds.size.width);
 viewController.view.transform = CGAffineTransformConcat(viewController.view.transform, CGAffineTransformMakeRotation((M_PI * 90 / 180.0)));
 viewController.view.center = window.center;
#endif 

After adding this code, your application, when run on the iPhone will rotate and resize the root view automatically just by virtue of having set the statusBarOrientation to UIInterfaceOrientationLandscapeRight. That's not the case when running it on the simulator, which is why the block of code in the conditional is necessary. With that, the code should behave exactly the same on the device and in the simulator.

To compile this code, you're also going to need to add the CoreGraphics framework. Make sure to add the framework using a reference type of "Relative to Current SDK'. The version for the device is located here:

/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneOS2.1.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreGraphics.framework