Is there a way to set the background color or navigation bar universally across an app?

Question

Right now, I have to do something like the below before pushing a view every time

    _homeNavigationController.navigationBar.barStyle = UIBarStyleBlack;
    _homeNavigationController.navigationBar.tintColor = nil;     

And I want to set the color to different one using an patterned image.

So is there a simple way to do it?

Answer 1

You can use the appearance protocol if you are on iOS 5.

[[UINavigationBar appearance] setBackgroundImage:myImage];

Documentation can be found here:

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/uikit/reference/UIAppearance_Protocol/Reference/Reference.html

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/UIKit/Reference/UINavigationBar_Class/Reference/UINavigationBar.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40006887

Answer 2

If you want to use custom tint colors (other than the built-in constants), use this code:

Define these somewhere globally.

#define RGBCOLOR(r,g,b)         [UIColor colorWithRed:(r)/255.0f green:(g)/255.0f blue:(b)/255.0f alpha:1]
#define COLOR_NAVBAR_TINT           RGBCOLOR(82, 154, 217)
#define COLOR_TOOLBAR_TINT          RGBCOLOR(82, 154, 217)

Add this to your AppDelegate.m, and then invoke it during your app's initialization:

- (void)initializeGlobalTheme {
    [[UINavigationBar appearance] setTintColor:COLOR_NAVBAR_TINT];
    [[UIToolbar appearance] setTintColor:COLOR_TOOLBAR_TINT];
}