UIKit Appearance Proxy for Custom UITabBar - iphone

Question

I want to create a custom UITabBar and am familiar with the appearance proxy. I know I can set its background image to whatever I want. How can I change the selected state of each tab? Essentially I would like to remove the gloss/shine effect.

Answer 1

You need to grab the actual UITabBarItem
Something like this should do the trick for individual items
UITabBar *tabBar = tabBarViewController.tabBar;
for(UITabBarItem *tabItem in tabBar.items)
{
//in reality you will probably change these images and grab from the array individually
UIImage *selectedImage = [UIImage imageNamed:#"selected.png"];
UIImage *unselectedImage = [UIImage imageNamed:#"unselected.png"];
[tabItem setFinishedSelectedImage:selectedImage withFinishedUnselectedImage:unselectedImage];
}
alternatively you can just use the proxy to alter all UITabBarItems using
[UITabBarItem appearance]

Answer 2

You may use the appearance proxies for UIBarItem and UITabBarItem to accomplish this.
From Apple's documentation:
Customizing Appearance
In iOS v5.0 and later, you can customize the
appearance of tab bars by setting item label text attributes using
appearance selectors declared by UIBarItem. You can also use the
methods listed in “Customizing Appearance.” You can customize the
appearance of all segmented controls using the appearance proxy (for
example, [UITabBarItem appearance]), or just of a single tab bar. You
can also provide finished selected and unselected images using the
methods listed in “Managing the Finished Selected Image”; these
methods, though, so not participate in the UIAppearance proxy API (see
UIAppearance). UIKit does now provide any automatic treatment to
finished images. For good results, you must provide finished selected
and unselected images in matching pairs using
setFinishedSelectedImage:withFinishedUnselectedImage:.