UIImageView category adding suppport for remote images coming from the web asynchronously with caching.

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How To Use

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Create movie from images seq.

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I recently began writing a short example to learn more about the iOS 5 Appearance API and customizing UINavigationBar objects. The goal was to add a custom background, title and text to the navbar. Once I had this working, to keep a consist look across my application, I began tweaking the buttons on the navbar using the same Appearance API.

As I got further into the customization of the buttons, I ran into a method within UIImage that was introduced in iOS 5, resizableImageWithCapInsets. I found myself getting side-tracked from the original idea of navbar look and feel, to understanding how cap insets work. This post delves into what I learned.

Cap Insets with UIButton

As the documentation describes, you use resizableImageWithCapInsets to add cap insets to an image, when the image is resized or scaled, cap areas are not affected. The best way to understand this is through an example.

Let’s assume I want all the buttons on my UI to have a similar look, a gradient with a white border. Below is the image used for the examples in this post (the button is shown on a gray backdrop so you can see the white border):

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To be successful on the App Store, your app needs to stand out. The vanilla user-interface “look and feel” provided by Apple just doesn’t cut it any more in a crowded market.

Many of the most popular apps on the App Store present standard iOS UI elements in a non-standard fashion:

• Twitter employs a custom UITabBar
• Instagram uses both a custom UITabBar and a custom UINavigationBar
• Epicurious for iPad customizes elements of the standard split-view interface

Create a cool custom user interface with iOS 5's new UIKit and UIAppearance APIs!

Prior to iOS 5, many developers had to take somewhat unconventional approaches to achieve these results. Although subclassing and overriding drawRect: was the recommended approach, many resorted to the dreaded “method swizzling”.

But with iOS 5, those dark days are over! iOS 5 has included many new APIs you can use to easily customize the appearance of various UIKit controls.

To illustrate some of these new APIs, in this tutorial we’re going to take a “plain vanilla” app about surfing trips and customize the UI to get a more “beach-themed” look-and-feel.

To get the most out of this tutorial, you need to know the basics of iOS development first. If you are new to iOS development, you should check out some of the other tutorials on this site first.

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