Make Safari stop rotating, for better bedtime surfing

I don’t know about anyone else, but much of my iPhone Web surfing happens during down time: when I’m lounging on the couch or on the floor of the family room, or before I go to sleep at night. Sometimes I’m sitting up, but I occasionally lean to the side, and now and then I even—gasp—lie down.

Which presents a small problem: When I lie down, my head and the iPhone both change their orientation by about 90 degrees. The iPhone takes this as a cue to automatically rotate the Safari window back to vertical; my eyes, sadly, don’t have such a feature. Horizontal person + vertical page = awkward reading.

My workaround has been to instead turn the iPhone just far enough horizontally that it doesn’t auto-rotate, and then angle my head up far enough that the Safari window is roughly aligned with my field of view. It works, but the ideal solution would be an option to temporarily disable the otherwise-handy auto-rotate feature.

Through the magic of Twitter, Chris Pepper pointed me to a nearly-as-good workaround:

The other day I was lying on my side, trying to read a web page on the iPhone. I turned the iPhone 90° clockwise, but it obligingly re-rotated the text 90° counter-clockwise, leaving me again out of sync. I grumbled something about the irritation of being outmaneuvered by a handheld gadget. Amy’s brilliant suggestion: rotate it another 90° CCW. Since the iPhone doesn’t offer 180° rotation, this left the text rotated 90° in alighnment with my head.

He’s right: Safari rotates the first 90 degrees, but not the second, leaving Safari’s window in the perfect position for reading in bed. A simple tip, but one that will immeasurably improve my night-time NewsGator browsing.

Category: Tips & Troubleshooting

Posted by Dan Frakes on Feb 19 2008, 6:47 PM ET

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