I am googling around so much, but nowhere I find a straight and consolidated answer.
I want to customize myUITabBarController
such that:
UITabBar
itself is completely blackUITabBar
blackI am guessing I need to use the UIAppearance
API for this, and actually I was able to turn the UITbarBar
black using: [[UITabBar appearance] setBarTintColor:[UIColor blackColor]];
.
However, the color of the text items doesn't seem to do what I want, after googling around, the following solutions made sense to me, but it only changes the non-highlighted state to white, highlighted stays white as well...
NSDictionary *titleAttributes = @{NSForegroundColorAttributeName : [UIColor whiteColor]};
[[UITabBarItem appearance] setTitleTextAttributes:titleAttributes forState:UIControlStateNormal];
UIColor *titleHighlightedColor = [UIColor redColor];
NSDictionary *highlightedTitleAttributes = @{NSForegroundColorAttributeName : titleHighlightedColor};
[[UITabBarItem appearance] setTitleTextAttributes:highlightedTitleAttributes forState:UIControlStateHighlighted];
About the multicolored icons, so far by approach was to simply set the icons in Storyboards like this:
But this doesn't do what I want, it only shows the whole icon in grey when the item is not selected. When the item is selected, the icon completely disappears.
This is the original icon:
This is how it looks when the item is not selected:
And here it is in the selected stated, as mentioned the icon completely disappears:
So, my question is how precisely I can achieve the above mentioned requirements. What am I currently missing? Am I better off doing everything in code than in Storyboards?
Note: I am targeting iOS versions greater than 7.0, so please include any version specific information if the behaviour differs between iOS 7 and iOS 8.
I had the same problem as you. As far as I know there is no difference for the different iOS versions.
I solved it programmatically like this:
Turning the bar color black works as following (You already said it) (in AppDelegate):
UITabBar.appearance().barTintColor = UIColor.blackColor()
To set the color of the title for the different states, I used this code (in AppDelegate):
UITabBarItem.appearance().setTitleTextAttributes([NSForegroundColorAttributeName!: UIColor.redColor()], forState:.Selected)
UITabBarItem.appearance().setTitleTextAttributes([NSForegroundColorAttributeName!: UIColor.whiteColor()], forState:.Normal)
(and 4.) You can achieve the different item colors, multicolored icons and different item colors for the different states, by setting the image programmatically and change the rendering mode (imageWithRenderingMode:
) to UIImageRenderingMode.AlwaysOriginal
, this looks as following (do this in the first view controller class for all your view controllers):
var recentsItem = self.tabBarController!.tabBar.items![0] as UITabBarItem
var recentsItemImage = UIImage(named:"recents.png")!.imageWithRenderingMode(UIImageRenderingMode.AlwaysOriginal)
var recentsItemImageSelected = UIImage(named: "recentsSelected.png")!.imageWithRenderingMode(UIImageRenderingMode.AlwaysOriginal)
recentsItem.image = recentsItemImage
recentsItem.selectedImage = recentsItemImageSelected
I hope this helps, if you have any following questions, feel free to ask me.