What's On For Today?

1.Theming Applications

2.Introducing UIAppearance

3.Example

How do you "theme" your application with color, style?

Common UI Customizations

– UINavigationBar tint color, title image

– UIToolbar tint color

– UIBarButtonItem tint color, style

– UIButton, UILabel, etc.

Pre-iOS5, How Did We Customize?

– viewWillAppear:

– Subclassing UIKit classes' drawRect: method

– NSNotificationCenter

Pre-iOS5, How Did We Customize?

-(void)viewWillAppear:(BOOL)animated:{ [super viewWillAppear:animated]; // What is our current theme? NSUserDefaults *settings = [NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults]; NSString *theme = [settings objectForKey:@"theme"];

// Set up color based on theme if ([theme isEqualToString:@"red"]) { self.navBar.tintColor = [UIColor redColor]; } else { self.navBar.tintColor = [UIColor blueColor]; }}

The Problem With All Of This

• Every view controller needs to "know" about how to handle themes/styles

• Lots of copy & pasted code, annoying to maintain or add themes

Swinburne University of Technology

What's On For Today?

1. Theming Applications

2. Introducing UIAppearance

3. Example

Without UIAppearance

UINavigationBar

UINavigationBar

UINavigationBar

UIViewController

UIViewController

UIViewController

setTintColor:

setTintColor:

setTintColor:

With UIAppearance, 1

UINavigationBar

UINavigationBar

UINavigationBar

ThemeManager

setTintColor:

UIAppearance Proxy

setTintColor:

With UIAppearance, 2

UIAppearance Proxy

UIViewController

-tintColor:UINavigationBar

alloc/init

Current UIAppearance classes

– UIActivityIndicatorView– UIBarButtonItem– UIBarItem– UINavigationBar– UIProgressView– UISearchBar– UISegmentedControl– UISlider– UISwitch– UITabBar– UITabBarItem– UIToolbar

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9424112/what-properties-can-i-set-via-an-uiappearance-proxy

More details…

• Unfortunately, Apple hasn't documented this feature well yet.

• Unfortunately, not all UIView subclasses work yet

• Search for UI_APPEARANCE_SELECTOR in Spotlight

• Full reverse-engineered list here: http://www.raywenderlich.com/4344/user-interface-customization-in-ios-5

Who is missing?

• UITableViewCell• UITextField• UILabel

What's On For Today?

1.Theming Applications

2.Introducing UIAppearance

3.Example

THANK YOU

Questions?