ios5 Appearance

Since iOS 5 as a developer you can finally change the tint/design of some elements without much trouble. Changing the background of your UINavigationBar just became so much easier.

@selector(appearance)

The classes that support the UIAppearance protocol have access to an appearance selector. This returns the appearance proxy for the receiver.

It’s on this proxy that you can call selectors like setTintColor:, setBackgroundImage:forBarMetrics:, etc…

Here is a list of classes that are supported:

UIActivityIndicatorView
UIBarButtonItem
UIBarItem
UINavigationBar
UIPopoverController
UIProgressView
UISearchBar
UISegmentedControl
UISlider
UISwitch
UITabBar
UITabBarItem
UIToolbar
UIView
UIViewController
Change the navigation bar background

Here is a quick example how you can easily set the background image of a navigation bar for the whole application.

Add the following line of code to your application:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions: in your AppDelegate:

[[UINavigationBar appearance]
setBackgroundImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"navbar.png"]
forBarMetrics:UIBarMetricsDefault];
This will set the navbar.png image as a background on your navigation bar for all the navigation bars in your application.

Appearance depending on containment

But what if you want your popover to have the default blue UINavigationBar, but you just changed the appearance for the application. Than you can add this line of code:

[[UINavigationBar appearanceWhenContainedIn:
[UIPopoverController class], nil]
setBackgroundImage:nil
forBarMetrics:UIBarMetricsDefault];
When the UINavigationBar is used inside a UIPopoverController, then the background image for the navigation bar will be nil, and therefore the default background will be shown.

You can use UIPopoverController, your custom UIViewController classes, etc… as the containment classes.

What selectors are available on a class

How to find out which selectors can be accessed by the appearance proxy? Just go to XCode and go to the header file of a class, for example UINavigationBar.

In this header file you find the methods supported by the proxy by searching for the UI_APPEARANCE_SELECTOR constant. This is located behind the method definition.

You notice that the UINavigationBar appearance proxy supports the following selectors:

tintColor
setTintColor:
setBackgroundImage:forBarMetrics:
backgroundImageForBarMetrics:
titleTextAttributes
setTitleTextAttributes:
setTitleVerticalPositionAdjustment:forBarMetrics:
titleVerticalPositionAdjustmentForBarMetrics: