How to animate the textColor property of an UILabel?

iphone core-animation
dontWatchMyProfile picture dontWatchMyProfile · Mar 11, 2010 · Viewed 29.4k times · Source

For some reason, when I try to animate textColor, it won't work. The textColor just suddenly changes from A to B. Is it possible to animate it, from lets say red to black?

Answer

strange picture strange · Jan 2, 2014

Instead, have you tried using a crossfade transition on the object itself like this, it'll give you a nice fade-in fade-out effect from one color to another:

Objective C

[UIView transitionWithView:myLabel duration:0.25 options:UIViewAnimationOptionTransitionCrossDissolve animations:^{
    myLabel.textColor = NEW_COLOR;
} completion:^(BOOL finished) {
}];

Swift

UIView.transitionWithView(creditsLabel, duration: 0.25, options: .TransitionCrossDissolve, animations: {     
    self.creditsLabel.textColor = UIColor.redColor() 
}, 
completion: nil)

This is better than using NSTimers, CATextLayers and so on so forth for various reasons. CATextLayer does not have proper support for text kerning or NSAttributedText, and NSTimers are laggy (plus there's too much code). The transition animation above does the trick, and also can be used in a chain animation. I had the same issue and have already tried the solutions above but this simple code works wonders instead.

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