UINavigationBar Custom Title View

Question

I am using iOS 5 UINavigationBar's UIAppearance protocol in order to customise all my navigation bars.

Here is my customisation function:

- (void)customizeApperance
{
    [[UINavigationBar appearance] setTintColor:[UIColor clearColor]];
    [[UINavigationBar appearance] setAlpha:0.7];
    UIImageView *titleView = [[UIImageView alloc] initWithImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"title.png"]];
    [[UINavigationBar appearance] setTitleView:titleView];
}

I have two problems:

• The first is that the colour not appearing as clearColor but black. Any suggestions?

• The title view is not appearing at all. Ray Wenderlich shows how to do that by adding a: [[rootViewController navigationItem] setTitleView: [[UIImageView alloc] initWithImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"miniLogo.png"]]] in applicationDidFinishLaunching. But the problem with this is that the title view would only be added in the root view controller. I am using a UINavigationController and when I tired to replace the rootViewController with navigationController (the name of my navigation controller in AppDelegate), I cannot see the title view at all. How can I fix that? Why isn't it working in customizeApperance()? Isn't the whole point of using appearance is to just create a title view once (as I did above the function) and have it global in all navigation bars? How can I achieve that?

Answer 1

[UIColor clearColor] is a fully transparent color (alpha = 0). Setting that as tint color makes the (black) background shine through. Perhaps you want [UIColor whiteColor] ?

titleView is a property of UINavigationItem, and each view controller has it's own navigationItem. Therefore you cannot set a title view globally. But you can set the background image of UINavigationBar with the appearance protocol, perhaps that helps:

[[UINavigationBar appearance] setBackgroundImage:image forBarMetrics:UIBarMetricsDefault];