When working on a project, it was brought to my attention that the app’s custom navigation bar image wasn’t displaying. After looking at the code, the previous developer was using the drawRect: method to set the image. This no longer works in iOS 5 because the method never gets called, unless you subclass UINavigationBar. Below is a snippet of code to get the image to display on iOS 5 devices.

*UPDATE: Use run-time checking!*

float version = [[[UIDevice currentDevice] systemVersion] floatValue];
if (version >= 5.0) {
    [[UINavigationBar appearance] setBackgroundImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"portrait_image.png"] forBarMetrics: UIBarMetricsDefault];
    [[UINavigationBar appearance] setBackgroundImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"landscape_image.png"] forBarMetrics:UIBarMetricsLandscapePhone];
    [[UIBarButtonItem appearance] setTintColor:[UIColor colorWithRed:201.0/255 green:31.0/255 blue:56.0/255 alpha:1]];
}
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