Question

I want my table cells to load fast, so I am setting all my UILabels inside my cell to be opaque=YES; This is fine, because I also set the backgrounds to white and it looks normal.

The problem comes when you click the cell, since the backgrounds of those labels are white, the blue selected color looks pretty bad when trying to highlight the cell. Is there a work around for this? Would setting the background color of those cells to clearColor just defeat the purpose of setting opaque?

Answer 1

There is something you have to consider. First, setting the labels to opaque is definitely the right way of getting good scrolling performance.

The proper way to do this is declaring a subclass of UITableViewCell and overwrite the setBackgroundColor method like this and forward the background color to each element of the cell:

- (void) setBackgroundColor:(UIColor *)color {
    [super setBackgroundColor:color];
    [titleLabel setBackgroundColor:color];
    [imageView setBackgroundColor:color];
    [timeLabel setBackgroundColor:color];
}

I used this as the file’s Owner of the XIB where the tableview cell is defined and have connected the UI elements to outlets in this custom subclass.