How do you target particular UIViews when styling its UIAppearance? - iphone

Question

I am setting global styles in iOS 5 with UIAppearance. Here's an example:
[[UIbarButtonItem appearance]
setTtitletextAttributes:someStyle
forState:UIControlStateNormal
];
It looks good in most cases:
But there are cases where the global style looks ugly, like in a movie player.
For the movie player, I would prefer to have the default blue button. So how would I target only the back button's appearance and not the done button's appearance? I have similar issues with targeting normal table cells and grouped table cells.

Answer 1

You need to use a custom subclass of UINavigationBar. Let's call it MyNavigationBar. Then you can do this:
[[UIBarButtonItem appearanceWhenContainedIn:[MyNavigationBar class], nil]
setTintColor:[UIColor redColor]];
and it will only affect buttons within your navigation bar, not the MPMoviePlayerController's navigation bar.
The problem, of course, is that UINavigationController always uses a basic UINavigationBar... if you create it in code. But if you create it in a nib, you can click on its navigation bar (in the nib's document outline) and change the bar's class in the Identity inspector.

Answer 2

If in your AppDelegate you just replace
[[UINavigationBar appearance] setBackgroundImage:[UIImage imageNamed:#"navback"]
forBarMetrics:UIBarMetricsDefault];
with
[[UINavigationBar appearanceWhenContainedIn:[UINavigationController class], nil]
setBackgroundImage:[UIImage imageNamed:#"navback"] forBarMetrics:UIBarMetricsDefault];
movie player will have proper black bar in full screen mode. Works in iOS 5 and iOS 6

Answer 3

You can actually change the proxy to just target certain view hierarchies. In other words, when the view you want to customize is contained in a certain view, you can modify its appearance differently from the rest. So set your global (white) style first, but then call the following method to customize the appearance for when the button appears in an MPMoviePlayerController or whatever else.
[[UIBarButtonItem appearanceWhenContainedIn:
[MPMoviePlayerController class], nil]
setTitletextAttributes:someStyle
forState:UIControlStateNormal];
Let me know if that helps!