Creating a blurring overlay view

Question

In the Music app of the new iOS, we can see an album cover behind a view that blurs it.

How can something like that be accomplished? I've read the documentation, but did not find anything there.

Answer 1

You can use UIVisualEffectView to achieve this effect. This is a native API that has been fine-tuned for performance and great battery life, plus it's easy to implement.

Swift:

//only apply the blur if the user hasn't disabled transparency effects
if !UIAccessibility.isReduceTransparencyEnabled {
    view.backgroundColor = .clear

    let blurEffect = UIBlurEffect(style: .dark)
    let blurEffectView = UIVisualEffectView(effect: blurEffect)
    //always fill the view
    blurEffectView.frame = self.view.bounds
    blurEffectView.autoresizingMask = [.flexibleWidth, .flexibleHeight]

    view.addSubview(blurEffectView) //if you have more UIViews, use an insertSubview API to place it where needed
} else {
    view.backgroundColor = .black
}

Objective-C:

//only apply the blur if the user hasn't disabled transparency effects
if (!UIAccessibilityIsReduceTransparencyEnabled()) {
    self.view.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor];

    UIBlurEffect *blurEffect = [UIBlurEffect effectWithStyle:UIBlurEffectStyleDark];
    UIVisualEffectView *blurEffectView = [[UIVisualEffectView alloc] initWithEffect:blurEffect];
    //always fill the view
    blurEffectView.frame = self.view.bounds;
    blurEffectView.autoresizingMask = UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleWidth | UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleHeight;

    [self.view addSubview:blurEffectView]; //if you have more UIViews, use an insertSubview API to place it where needed
} else {
    self.view.backgroundColor = [UIColor blackColor];
}

If you are presenting this view controller modally to blur the underlying content, you'll need to set the modal presentation style to Over Current Context and set the background color to clear to ensure the underlying view controller will remain visible once this is presented overtop.