iOS 5 added new was to modify the built-in UIKit controls adding a number of customizations, and previously I mentioned a tutorial on how to use the UIKit control customization features on the iOS 5 tutorial page.

Today I came across a library that allows you take things another step further providing a deeper level of customization for UITableView’s, the UINavigationBar and UITabBar.

This library provides a number of you can easily add shadowing, gradients, modify the corners and more.

Here are a couple of screenshots displaying some customized tableview’s and cells:

The Library is PrettyKit from Victor Pena, and can be found on Github here.

Cocos2D is an awesome 2D iphone game engine, it’s just really really good and the code inside is nicely organized.
However, to a beginner using Cocos2D it would seem that it does not work with UIKit based applications, this impression is largely Cocos2D’s fault.

I recently started a new game, and my plan is to use UIKit for some of the level-creation and imo there’s no need to use Cocos2D to simulate UIKit when UIKit is already an amazing UIKit simulator and readily available.

Last time I posted a similar idea, a lot of people found it useful, I started doing a write-up but to be honest it involves many steps that need explaining, and i’m not great at it.

So this time i’m instead providing it as a xcode project which you can open and compile and just start using!

Download / Repository

https://github.com/onedayitwillmake/Cocos2D-UIToolbar

Preview

Slight detail

• Cocos2D lives in side a EAGLView, and EAGLView is just a view that you can insert into other views!
• Especially in recent versions of iOS it plays very very nicely with other UIView’s occupying the screen at the same time
• I started off with Cocos2D Box2D template, put the default logic in RootViewController inside of a new UIViewController and made sure Cocos2D was not attaching itself to the window.