Custom nav bar styling - iOS

objective-c cocoa-touch ios uinavigationbar
phil swenson picture phil swenson · Apr 7, 2011 · Viewed 79.6k times · Source

Possible Duplicate:
How to add background image on iphone Navigation bar ?

iOS - How did the NY Times do this custom top navigation bar styling?

And for that matter, the bottom one?

ny-times

Answer

Christian Schnorr picture Christian Schnorr · Jun 17, 2011

@ludwigschubert's solution does however not work on iOS 5. Neither does overriding -drawRect:, because it isn't even called.
As of iOS 5, a navigation bar consist of a UINavigationBarBackground and a UINavigationItemView. There are two other ways of getting it work.

  1. Insert your custom image view at index 1 instead of 0. This makes it appear above the native background image while staying below the buttons.

  2. Make use of iOS 5's UIAppearance protocol. You can either set the background image for all

[[UINavigationBar appearance] setBackgroundImage:myImage forBarMetrics:UIBarMetricsDefault]

or for just one navigation bar:

[navigationController.navigationBar setBackgroundImage:myImage forBarMetrics:UIBarMetricsDefault]

Make sure to provide two images (UIBarMetricsDefault & UIBarMetricsLandscapePhone) when developing an iPhone app for both portrait and landscape.

Related questions

How to change UINavigationBar background color from the AppDelegate

I know how to change the UINavigationBar background image by doing [[UINavigationBar appearance] setBackgroundImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"nabbar"] forBarMetrics:UIBarMetricsDefault]; and I know how to set the bar to different colors within each Views..... Now I want to change the background …

Read More
Is there a way to change the height of a UINavigationBar in Storyboard without using a UINavigationController?

I want to use a custom UINavigationBar in one of my views, which is not a part of any UINavigationController-hierarchy. When I drag a UINavigationBar into Storyboard, it shows like this: This bar is 44px, which would be enough if …

Read More
Presenting a Modal View Controller hides the Navigation Bar

I have a navigation based app with a navigation bar, but there are a few instances where instead of pushing a view controller onto the stack, I need to present the view controller modally. The problem is that when I …

Read More