I am in kind of situation that I need to start with a tab based application and in that I need a split view for one or more tabs. But it seems that split view controller obj
I've written up a subclass for the UISplitViewController that will listen for changes to device orientation and orient itself accordingly. With this class, I can now place split views within a UITabBarController and each split view will behave correctly upon rotation, even if it's not the frontmost tab. I've successfully deployed this in TexLege and it was approved for use in the App Store, but your mileage may vary. Please see the repository at Github.
Feel free to fork and modify it, and I'm always interested in hearing comments (or complaints) about it. https://github.com/grgcombs/IntelligentSplitViewController