#ui

Add a background image to the navigation bar

Recently I was asked to add a pale (off-white) color as the background color of a navigation bar, which I thought would just be a case of updating the tintColor property . However when I did this instead of getting the gradient effect that we were after all I ended up…

Build the tab-bar from a plist

Working in a team, I often find myself trying to avoid using Interface Builder (IB) as much as possible. This is because trying to resolve the inevitable conflicts that arise when two developers change the same xib can be soul-destroying ⚰️. A sea of seemingly unrelated xml changes awaits anyone who…

Dynamically sizing UILabel

I use the below category when working with dynamic content. It has useful methods for setting up a UILabel frame based upon its content and restrictions that you place on it. .h @interface UILabel(Size) /* @method Adjusts UILabel's frame to begin at defined x and y position and have a…

Pop back multiple viewcontrollers

I sometimes find myself creating applications that have a Home viewcontroller and all other views should allow the user to directly return to this Home viewcontroller. I don't just want to push a fresh copy of the Home viewcontroller on the navigation stack. Instead, I need to loop through the…

Custom loading view

A common want in any application that communicates with a web service is to add a loading/loader view to show your user that the application is busy getting data and has not crashed. I've came up with a generic loading view that I use on multiple applications, its split…

Sticky UIPickerView

Recently on an application I came across an issue where when I showed a UIPickerView inside an action sheet the bottom half(ish) of the pickerview wasn't selectable. I had came across this before when showing buttons in an UIActionSheet and had overcome it by moving the button slightly higher…

Custom button table cell

I wrote this custom cell that ultimately was axed because it didn't fit into the UI that was later revised. I thought it was a shame to waste it so here it is in the full. It works by allowing you to define how buttons should appear in a cell,…

Moving from one tab to another programmatically

"How do you move from one tab to another programmatically?" This is a question that always seems to crop up and it turns out the answer to that question is a single line of code: self.tabBarController.selectedIndex = 6; Changing the selectedIndex value on a UITabBarController will cause…

Snugly fitting UILabels

On a project I had to come up with a way of dynamically adjusting a label's frame to match the content that was inside it. I first thought of using a UITextView instead of a label as my data could very well be multi-lined but decided against it when I…