QuickTip: Navigation Bar Image Fix in iOS 5

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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]];
}

This entry was posted on October 29, 2011, 9:54 pm and is filed under QuickTip. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Comments

• #1 by Andrew on November 1, 2011 - 6:01 pm

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  so this is compile time checking? should we also do runtime checking of the feature availability? do we need both?

• #2 by nick on November 1, 2011 - 6:08 pm

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  You’re correct, this is compile time. If you would like to do runtime checking something like this should work.

  float version = [[[UIDevice currentDevice] systemVersion] floatValue];
  if (version >= 5.0) {
  // code here
  }

• #3 by Andrew on November 2, 2011 - 11:20 am

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  so do you need to so both? for this specific instance with custom nav bars, would only compile suffice?

• #4 by nick on November 2, 2011 - 11:34 am

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  Just use the run-time, that is all you need.

• #5 by swati on November 8, 2011 - 2:55 am

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  Thanks..

• #6 by Tariq on January 16, 2012 - 7:10 am

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  many thanks to u…