Question

My app has several UILabels across it. There are several different styles that get re-used across the entire app, in different situations (different font sizes, different font colors, italic, etc). Is there a sane way to set global styles, without having several subclasses of UILabel?

Answer 1

How about taking cue from UITableViewCell. Create an enumerated type for all your styles and have one class that handles all the setup for the different style. Something like

MyStyledLabel* label = [[MyStyledLabel alloc] initWithFrame:frame style:MyStyledLabelDefaultStyle];

If you want to get clever, you can use bit fields to combine in different ways.

MyStyledLabel* label = [[MyStyledLabel alloc] initWithFrame:frame style:MyStyledLabelRedColor|MyStyledLabelBoldText];

Hope that give you some ideas.