How to change the highlight colour of tabbar icons? (iPhone/iPad)

Question

I have been looking around online for an answer to this question for several days now with no success. Essentially what I want to do is change the highlight colour of the icons in my UITabBar. By default they are highlighted in blue when selected, however I have seen several apps that have managed to change this (eg. McDonalds app, shown below).

enter image description here

What I would like to be able to do is set the highlight colour to red, if this is even possible please can someone help me?

NOTE: If it makes things any easier I'm targeting this app at users of iOS5+.

score 71 · Accepted Answer · edited Oct 07 '13 at 19:52

71

You can do this using the appearance proxy, new in iOS 5. In your app delegate's didFinishLaunching method:

[[UITabBar appearance] setSelectedImageTintColor:[UIColor redColor]];

In iOS 7 use:

[[UITabBar appearance] setTintColor:[UIColor redColor]];

See the UITabBar class reference for more details.

edited Oct 07 '13 at 19:52

juhan_h

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answered Feb 18 '12 at 08:23

jrturton

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Awesome Answer! I made a little method to convert hex values to uicolor and passed the colour to his. It worked like a charm! Thank you. – Septronic Nov 03 '15 at 23:12

score 8 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 25 '15 at 21:54

8

In swift put this:

 UITabBar.appearance().tintColor = UIColor.redColor()

inside of the app delegate's didFinishLaunching method... Just keeping up with the times.

answered Jun 25 '15 at 21:54

Gregory Hansell

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score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 18 '12 at 08:28

2

Try this :

[[[UITabBarItem alloc] init] setFinishedSelectedImage:(UIImage *)myImageRed.png withFinishedUnselectedImage:myImage.png];

answered Feb 18 '12 at 08:28

moxy

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How to change the highlight colour of tabbar icons? (iPhone/iPad)

3 Answers3