Custom background/transparent background on UIBarButtonItem?

Question

How is this effect achieved? Code snippets are highly welcome.

This can be seen in Notes app and other apps on the App Store.

It seem that either the buttons on the navigation controller are transparent and show the custom background of the navigation controller or that they themselves have a custom background applied to them. Any ideas on how this is achieved?

EDIT:

Here is an example from the iBooks app for the iPhone. As you can see, not only the UIButtons, but also the segmented control have custom backgrounds. I'm thinking that there is a way to globally set transparency/background to different interface elements.

http://c0839932.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/iBooks%201.1%20-%206.png

Answer 1

I don't think you can make it transparent just by setting some sort of property (but I might be wrong).

Look at the UIBarButtonItem documentation. There are init methods that will take a custom view or an image and create a UIBarButtonItem from it. So create a view or an image with the appearance you want and use that. One thing you might want to try is to create a UIButton the way you want it to look, and then do [[UIBarButtonItem alloc] initWithCustomView:button];

Another solution is to sent the tintColor property of your UINavigationBar to whatever color you want, and the button will take on that color.

Answer 2

you can also create a standard UIButton and set its style to custom and set your image or background for that button and drag it onto the UINavigationBar.