UItabbar code

[David Kelly]

Anyone made a custom UITabBar with setable font size and height of the bar or have any suggestions about going about it? I would like to make the bar icons easier to tap and for the text to be larger for people with poor eyesight. Thanks.

[David Kelly]

Nevermind got it. :)

[Philip Kirwan]

Share if you can please :)

[David Kelly]

Sure, see end result here:
http://www.newleafgames.com/IMG_0064.PNG

Bigger bar=
Create CustomUITabBarController : UITabBarController
and on viewDidLoad increase the frame size and adjust the origin

BiggerTabBarItemText=
I cheated: burned in the text into images and set the tab text to "" in IB.

Color tabbar icons=
Create a CustomUITabBarItem : UITabBarItem
and override - (UIImage*) unselectedImage & - (UIImage*) selectedImage
So they will return the colour image you want for the tab rather than coloured alpha channels

[Ian Little]

Looks good David.

It does bring up an interesting point in that I'm not sure whether Apple have a stated policy on
allowing certain rules in the Human interface guidelines to be breached (eg, height of the tabbar)
when it is done in the interests of accessibility (eg , for those with sight difficuties, etc).
When you submit the app , I wonder if you need to add notes to the effect that certain UI elements
for navigation have been re-proportioned for the benefit of those with sight difficulties, etc ?
It may be a red herring. Just interested in your views and the views of other developers on this.

[David Kelly]

Great comment Ian,
Other accepted apps have a larger tabbar "tweete is mentioned a lot as an example". Difference being tweete may have written a tabbar from scratch. But the standard tabbar does so many things well I can't justify spending time recreating functionality. Judging from the amount of questions in google about customizing the tabbar I think apple need to open it up a bit. I will not be drawing attention to the way I've done it in submission though :) App will be ready ahead of time so I will just have a standard bar version ready and resubmit if alarm bells sound.

[Ian Little]

Totally makes sense David,

I think you are right not to draw attention to the customization.
I guess part of the point I was making was that Apple ought to be less rigid on some of these things especially when accessibility is an issue. Based on the fact that tweetie, etc have been approved with some deviations from the standard UI widget sizes then I guess they already are giving some latitude on this.

Now, I'm completely engrossed in the 4.0 OS announcements. Anyone want to start a thread on that ?

[Ian Little]

David,

Something which occurred to me over the weekend ...

I had missed the fact that the 3gs has a setting for accessibility which allows a 3 finger double tap gesture to magnify and pan the screen contents. I reckon it is useful for those with sight difficulties when reading e-mails but less so for app navigation / screen controls.
As far as I'm aware it isn't available on the earlier 3g model of the iPhone nor on 2nd gen iPod touch.

[David Kelly]

Thanks Ian, I have a 3Gs and completely forgot about that feature. But as you say though its a little unwieldy, hard to scroll with three sausages on screen.