It's worth checking out how Amazon did their iPhone Kindle. When you initiate a rotation, it pops up a little button at the corner of the screen for about 2 seconds that allows you to lock that orientation. Most elegant implantation I've seen. It doesn't solve the issue of the user wanting to initiate a rotation without the accelerometer.

On the other hand, unless you're on the International Space Station, you probably have enough space to rotate the screen relative to gravity and lock it.

I like this idea. It does need to be a system-wide thing really, and while this does add a bit of settings and UI clutter it’s a common enough problem that Apple should be doing something to address it.

It might actually reduce clutter, since plenty of apps are now individually adding rotation options to their settings. Having a system-wide setting would simply consolidate all of these in one place.

It was Tweetie 2's auto-rotation which pushed me over the edge and into writing 800 words about a telephone.

Not sure I recognise your problem with the iPhone on British trains. Maybe the trains wherever you are move faster than London Midland :-)

It's mainly a problem when standing up on a busy commuter train. Luckily I don't do that much.

Tweetie 2 is one of the few apps with reasonably robust settings exposed to turn off or selectively use auto rotation.

Amen. The most annoying 'feature' on my iPhone is auto-rotate. I'll be driving along in my car with my iPhone being used as my iPod, and every time I lay the device down it goes into landscape and I need to put it back when I want to change a song.

I haven't jailbroken my iPhone yet, but SBSettings has a solution for autorotation, and brightness, and almost anything that annoys me with my iPhone on a daily basis.

Now that I have seen SBSettings, I am considering jailbreaking. Apple should do something like SBSettings.

http://theappleblog.com/2009/06/22/sbsettings-why-i-still-ja...

I have a Jailbroken iPhone with SBSettings and the Rotation switch. First I find no problems with the rotation, I have a 1g iphone for more than a year now, and the only problem I had with rotation was when I was laying, with that SBsettings switch, it's solved. Second, I agree that SBsettings is the most useful iPhone App and Apple should really look into its features and make them builtin.

You're right, it's almost enough to push one into jailbreaking. But I think I'd prefer to run a supported configuration. Computers shouldn't be unnecessarily exciting.

Jailbreaking made my iPhone twice as useful. I wouldn't be as enthousiastic about it as I am now if I wasn't able to install a lot of useful software that's only available outside of the Appstore.

I buy most of my software in the Appstore but I've also paid for software on Cydia.

Lookup SBSettings (has a button for quickly toggling WiFi on and off, awesome for battery life and my initial reason to jailbreak), RotationInhibitor, Lock Calendar and iDitDahText (brilliant!).

Amen!

Surely this solution is still going to fail the walking/train test -- the icon will be on the screen permanently in those situations.

The phone will detect movement, the icon will appear, it'll fade after a few seconds, the movement will be interpreted as the "shake to bring it back", it'll reappear, then fade, and repeat ad nauseum.

To solve this very problem, the idea of the "cross out" delete-like gesture is to disable it until it's really sure that it's been rotated back.

I'd like to be able to disable rotation in a web-app. Like a meta-tag or something.

I recently acquired an iPod Touch, and have not been able to deduce how to activate the rotation feature reliably. I twist it around various which ways trying to make it rotate, and sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Reading this article actually gives me a better idea of how to make it happen reliably. Specifically, I didn't realize that the accelerometer detects motion relative to gravity (makes sense, but I didn't know that).

It's not exactly a sign of successful UI design that knowing an implementation detail of the hardware is helpful in controlling your phone.

Could easily be solved by a setting that turns off accl switching and allows users to make a two finger twisting gesture on the screen to rotate it.

The iPhone's accessibility makes use of a lot of the two finger gestures already. Not this one, but most others. http://www.apple.com/iphone/how-to/index.html#accessibility.....

This particular gesture doesn't really make sense for Apple to use (for rotation, or anything else); its not very intuitive. It doesn't map to any other gesture that users have done on the computer before. Apple would have to teach users how to use this gesture. Its one thing for a game to have ann instruction screen, but quite another for the iPhone to do so.

Preview and a few other OS X apps do currently support a rotational gesture on trackpads. It's not very widespread or widely-known, but it is there already.

I wouldn't suggest it as a default setting. If power users want an alternative to holding the device up and shaking it until it switches, this could be it. You make good points, it's not intuitive, but it is a solution that wouldn't require more cluttering UI

Where else is there an "Only for power users" feature in iPhone OS? There's no precedent for this sort of behavior in the iPhone's UI anywhere. No other built-in app has that kind of setting. The closest that I can think of is the developers debug menu in Safari. And thats not "hidden", its just tucked away because its only meant for developing and does get in the way otherwise.

A lot of the iPhone settings could be considered for "power users". There's a setting to tell the phone what to do when the home button is pressed; there's one to turn on Caps Lock, Shake to Shuffle, change the Photos' slideshow transition... they aren't unreconicilably technical, but they're subtle tweaks to functionality that power users would enjoy most.

In my informal poll of iPhone users, those I would consider non-technical also were frustrated with auto-rotation. I don't think this is something for power users only.

I'm not saying that the problem is only a power users problem. Just that the proposed solution is. A simple toggle switch somewhere in Settings.app would work just fine. Or some other solution. Just not this particular solution, a multifinger rotating gesture to rotate the device.

However, if it's an option deep in Settings, it's likely that many people who are infuriated with auto-rotation won't find it. By making the UI offer more control and responsiveness, it will help even those users who don't want to go digging into Settings.

I'm not sure (see article) -- it would mean every app developer would have to test with it on and off to make sure that gesture didn't get in the way of their UI. It's also hard for users annoyed with the feature to discover.

I suspect that particular gesture is a little awkward. Try it! Getting enough motion to reliably detect it as something different to a scroll or pinch is almost painful.

I was reading in bed just the other day wishing that I could turn off autorotation. This is a serious need.

If you turn it so the home button points up, it won't rotate.

Edit: for clarity, hopefully.

See also: shake to undo typing

I read this wrong...is that an iPhone in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me.