Question

I’ve run into the issue of using a UIBarButtonItem with a custom color. Everything out on the ‘net seems to indicate that the only way around this lack of official API support revolves around the use of images. This is all fine and dandy when developing for pre-iOS 4 devices, except when using the new iPhone 4. Creating an image for iPad and pre-iOS 4 devices is straightforward enough, but the images developed for those devices look absolutely horrid on iPhone 4. I suspect that this problem will be exacerbated further with the introduction of next generation devices.

Consider the example below. Notice how the default colored button is nice and smooth, but the iPhone 3GS image looks terrible. It does not seem very scalable (pun intended) to have to include multiple images for different resolution devices.

In the absence of an official API for changing the color of a UIBarButtonItem, what strategies are out there for creating images that scale well against differing resolution devices? This problem is hardly unique to UIBarButtonItems, how is the community adapting to other UI elements that are bitmapped? Is there a better solution for this particular case than using an image (such as using Quartz to draw it)?

If at all possible, please offer concrete code examples.

Answer 1

Been over a year since I posted this question, but ran into a use case where I wanted to be able to do this, so instead of having to draw or otherwise create the buttons, I decided to write an open source application to create them. This application uses private APIs to change the colors of the UIBarButtonItem objects and then uses a graphics context to save them to a determined location on your computer’s file system. This way you can have pixel perfect UIBarButtonItem images to use in your UIToolbars.

The app creates both the standard and @2x resolution images.

UIBarButtonItem-Generator @ GitHub