Question

I need a UIButton but I don’t want a border for it.

However I still want to keep that nice gradient overlay when somebody touches the button

Like on the Facebook iPad app, the text links they have in the News Feed which show a gray box overlay when you touch them.

I saw a solution on here about using a UISegmentedControl. However I don’t want to have to use gradients/the Quartz framework in the solution.

Has anyone come across this problem before?

UPDATE

Here’s an illustration

(1) is before you touch (2) is what happens when you touch the button.

I basically just want to replicate this effect, I guess a transparent ‘overlay’, like what happens when you touch a button, but without a border.

Answer 1

Use the following:

UIButton *yourButton = [UIButton buttonWithType:UIButtonTypeCustom];
[yourButton setFrame:CGRectMake(0, 0, 200, 44)];
[yourButton setTitle:@"like" forState:UIControlStateNormal];

[yourButton setBackgroundImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"normal.png"] forState:UIControlStateNormal];
[yourButton setBackgroundImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"gradient.png"] forState:UIControlStateHighlighted];

// Round corners? Requires Quartzcore framework
[yourButton.layer setCornerRadius:8.0f];
[yourButton.layer setMasksToBounds:YES];
[yourButton.layer setBorderWidth:0.0f];