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To be successful on the App Store, your app needs to stand out. The vanilla user-interface “look and feel” provided by Apple just doesn’t cut it any more in a crowded market.
Many of the most popular apps on the App Store present standard iOS UI elements in a non-standard fashion:
Twitter employs a custom UITabBar
Instagram uses both a custom UITabBar and a custom UINavigationBar
Epicurious for iPad customizes elements of the standard split-view interface
Prior to iOS 5, many developers had to take somewhat unconventional approaches to achieve these results. Although subclassing and overriding drawRect: was the recommended approach, many resorted to the dreaded “method swizzling”.
But with iOS 5, those dark days are over! iOS 5 has included many new APIs you can use to easily customize the appearance of various UIKit controls.
To illustrate some of these new APIs, in this tutorial we’re going to take a “plain vanilla” app about surfing trips and customize the UI to get a more “beach-themed” look-and-feel.
