iOS: shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation / Lock Orientation in PhoneGap

Starting in PhoneGap 0.9.5 there’s an undocumented iOS only feature that allows you to handle whether the device should rotate to a particular orientation. It exposes the iOS Objective-C method shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation with a JavaScript function shouldRotateToOrientation.

function shouldRotateToOrientation (rotation) {
    switch (rotation) {
        //Portrait or PortraitUpsideDown
        case 0:
        case 180:
            return true;
        //LandscapeRight or LandscapeLeft
        case 90:
        case -90:
             return false;
    }
}

This needs to be in the global scope of your JavaScript and will get called before any rotations occur, so keep it lean to avoid locking up the UI. Returning true allows the device to rotate, returning false prevents it.

Works great in your HTML5 iOS, iPhone and iPad apps, sadly currently there’s no Android or other platform integration. Hopefully we’ll see a cross-platform method soon!

Quickly Creating an HTML Link in JavaScript

A cool and little known JavaScript function is .link() available to all string objects. Calling string.link(url) returns an HTML string for an anchor tag with the URL in it. For example:

var text = 'the best website ever';
var html = text.link('http://bencollier.net/'); 
html === "the best website ever" //true

A great way to quickly make links without having to do:

var text = "the best website ever";
var url = "http://bencollier.net/";
var html = "" + text +"" ;
html === "the best website ever" //true