How to switch skins (or design themes) in iOS app?

Question

I'd like to make my iPhone app to be able to switch between skins (or design theme, or look and feel, such as wooden, metal, earth color, men's, girls, etc...).

I'll prepare some sets of skins that contains images for buttons and backgrounds, sounds, and text color, and let the user decide which set of skin they want to use by the application settings.

What is the best practice to implement this?

The conditions are:

• I'd like to use Interface Builder
• I need to support iOS 3.1.3 and later
• I want to make the sets of skins downloadable from the internet (I can't bundle all the skins in the app, as one set of skin requires lots of images and the app file size could become huge if I do so... I also don't want to hardcode any information about specific skins.)
• If a custom skin does not contain one or some elements, (such as an image or sound file), I want it to use the missing element from the default set of skin.
• I don't want to create Nib files for each skin. The Nib file for one screen should be the only one in the main bundle for easier maintenance.

I'm thinking about making a superclass of all the UIViewControllers in my app and override the part that it loads Nib file, and instead of loading from the main bundle, load the resources from the skin that is saved in the Document directory... but I don't know how to do it... The default behavior of the Nib-loading methods always loads resources from the main bundle and the information about resource file names are lost after reading... :(

Thanks in advance for your help.

Answer 1

Am not sure about best practice .. But, if your app is not big enough, then a well structured plist is your friend.

Initially, you could choose: Metal Theme. The following should hold:

You either have a Singleton ThemeManager, or just stick an NSDictionary to one of your Singletons if appropriate.

The point behind the ThemeManager is the mapping between the asset and the theme..

Some sample code (written directly on SOF .. Don't mind Syntax mistakes):

#define kThemeMap(__x__) [[ThemeManager sharedManager] assetForCurrentTheme:__x__]

...

-(void)doUselessStuff {
    UIImage* backgroundImage = [UIImage imageNamed:kThemeMap(@"FirstViewBG")];

    ...

}

//in the ThemeManager:
//returns the appropriate name of the asset based on current theme
-(NSString*)assetForCurrentTheme:(NSString*)asset {
    //_currentTheme is an NSDictionary initialized from a plist. Plist can be downloaded, too.
    NSString* newAsset = [_currentTheme objectForKey:asset];
    if(newAsset == nil) {
        newAsset = [_defaultTheme objectForKey:asset];
    }
    return asset;
}

//Let us assume the user selects Metal Theme somewhere .. Still coding ThemeManager:
-(void)selectedNewTheme:(NSString*)newTheme {
    //First, get the full path of the resource .. Either The main bundle, or documents directory or elsewhere..
    NSString* fullPath = ...;
    self.currentTheme = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithContentsOfFile:fullPath];
}

The plist files are just a dictionary with string to string mapping... something like this:

//Default.plist
@"FirstViewBG"  : @"FirstViewBG_Default.png"
@"SecondViewBG" : @"SecondViewBG_Default.png"
@"WinSound"     : @"WinSound_Default.aiff"

//Metal.plist
@"FirstViewBG"  : @"FirstViewBG_Metal.png"
@"SecondViewBG" : @"SecondViewBG_Metal.png"
@"WinSound"     : @"WinSound_Metal.aiff"

Alternatively, you can just save the postfix, if that is good enough for you.. But, it will require string manipulation, by slicing the extension -> adding the postfix -> adding the extension ..

Or maybe make it a prefix?