Objective-C: Custom UI elements

Question

I am a noob just getting started with Obj-C and iPhone development. I've been going through many examples and tutorials for the past 2 weeks and making good progress learning how to use the CoreLocation, CoreGraphics, MapKit, UI, etc. Very basic and straight-forward. There are many tutorials out there on these subjects.
However, now with that functionality in the bag, I am starting on putting my our project together. Our UI designer has created custom views of many iPhone controls like the UIToolbar, UIActionsheet, etc. Like having custom images for backgrounds and buttons. I cannot find any solid tutorials or advice on how to go about customizing things like the tab bar. For example, some say to create a Category overriding the drawRect method. Others say to subclass the UIToolbar class, but this say this is not recommended and may get appStore rejected. At this point I am confused and frustrated at which direction to start. Can someone with experienced with UI customization and app store approval please give me some direction or point me to some good tutorials? Thank you.

Answer 1

I would suggest that you can customise what Apple allow you to easily do with the available APIs and follow Apple's advice to not override drawrect. Oh and watch some of this years ADC videos.

Of course the coming ios5 will greatly increase your uikit customisation possibilities for ios5 devices.