John Casasanta on Amazon.com’s Kindle app for the iPhone:
[…] But there’s one thing that stood out to me in the app when I stumbled upon it. It’s a brilliant fix to an issue that’s been plaguing the iPhone since day 1, and made even worse with the 3.0 update… If you’re reading on your iPhone while lying down, it often inadvertently flips from portrait to landscape orientation. Amazon’s fix is to add a “rotate lock” control that appears in the bottom-right corner when the orientation changes.
To say the least, this ingenious little UI element has taken away a lot of frustration for me. Nice job, Amazon!
I wish Apple would adopt this mechanism for their own apps, especially Safari and Mail.
It is really annoying while lying down, indeed. This actually must be an option on every app where the landscape orientation is just a wider version of the portrait one. Some games let you choose it on the settings, but Amazon’s solution, obviously, is more convenient.
