Altering the look and feel of Iphone UI components.

Question

I've come over from experimenting with android to Iphone development. so i'm having a lot of trouble not only finding what i'm looking for but knowing even the right term to use for this subject. Alright, this is what i'm looking for, i just need to know if it's possible, and if it is, a push in the right direction.

The best way i can describe it is skinning. in the end this is all i really need. What I'd like to be able to do is create a custom skin for different ui elements ex: custom button idle and down image.

I'm not really looking for a "trick" or "work-around", i really just want to know if the sdk has this, or if iphone supports such a thing. If it didn't, bummer but I could get over it.

I hope i'm being clear enough, your aid is appreciated.

Answer 1

If you're looking for whether you can change individual visual attributes of UI elements then the answer is definitely.

In general to customize the individual UI elements you need to do so per component manually (or using interface builder). For example if you want to change the background color of a UIButton you need to set the backgroundColor property.

The iPhone SDK does not specifically supports skinning (or themes or styles) in the way you might be looking for it.

You can do smart things to cut down on code by for instance generically setting backgroundColor on several elements on your UIView. But I think you're looking for something that separates out style from components more like CSS does it.

In that vein you might want to look at the Three20 project which has the notion of "styles":

http://three20.info/overview#Style