How to make certain table cells animate in certain ways during the interface rotation animation?
===

I have a view controller in my app that I'm trying to get to behave like the iOS Messages app. It shows chat bubbles, with sent messages on the right and ones received on the left.

The issue is that with variable height cells that can be on either side of the screen, the interface is highly unpredictable, which makes certain tricks for doing interface rotation non-applicable (like taking a screenshot of half of the table that I know will be mostly empty and doing some kind of crossfading like the Mail app does).

I notice what Apple does to work around this is fix the chat bubbles at the same width regardless of orientation. This works because the most difficult part of the rotation animation were we to resize the cells as well is recalculating the text wrapping, etc, at every frame of animation. Here, we're just moving static images around.

My question is, how do you get the effect the Messages app does when you rotate to landscape? I have my cells essentially exactly the same as theirs (chat cells, text hugs one side of the screen, chat bubbles are the same width in portrait and landscape). Everything I've done with autoresizing masks has failed. Is there anything I can do short of looping through all the visible cells, taking a screenshot, and manually writing the transition with a bunch of image views?