Question

I don’t know how my client mocked up their screenshots, but they ended up with an image where the navigation bar has a kind of two-tone metallic look, like this:

But when I build the app, it ends up fading gradually from my tint colour towards white, like this:

The trouble is, the clients really like the way it looks in their mock-up. What can I do?

Answer 1

Subclass UINavigationBar. In your subclass, override drawRect: to custom-draw what you want. In your instance of UINavigationController, make sure the navigation bar is an instance of your subclass.

If you’re programmatically instantiating your navigation controller, you might not be able to do this–you may have to resort to adding a category to UINavigationBar that overrides drawing for all instances:

@implementation UINavigationBar (CustomDrawing)
- (void)drawRect: (CGRect)rect {
    // ...
}
@end

It’s also possible to use method swizzling to override UINavigationBar‘s default behaviour, but explaining method swizzling is beyond the scope of this question.