Customizing UINavigationItem

When an app you are writing is intended to have a highly customized look one of the things that may get special treatment is the UINavigationItem for view controllers that are managed by a UINavigationBar object.

Each UIViewController has its own UINavigationItem property that is pushed or popped by a UINavigationBar object that lays out navigation bar at the top of the view. 

I had two goals. 1) Drop custom left and right bar button items and custom text on the navigation bar and 2) Customize the animations between the navigation items in the navigation bar. So I needed to sub-class UINavigationBar for 2). And I needed to create a custom UINavigationItem that I could reuse everywhere and give the app a consistent look and feel. This would satisfy 1).

Unfamiliar Territory

One of the more interesting aspects of developing something of my own is that I'm not just responsible for the coding now. I am also responsible for, among other things, the design of the UI elements in the app.

At work the product I develop is mature enough that all the UI design cues have already been decided on and implemented. So if I need to create a new control, there are plenty of examples that show me what it should probably look like in order to fit in. 

Not having anything to draw on for my own work is a considerable challenge for me. I am a fairly creative person to begin with. I used to draw comic book superheroes for years while in school. I designed several web pages with their own graphics and Javascript animations. 

But the world of iOS apps is super competitive to the point that how an app's icon looks like amongst its App Store competitors can make or break it. A simple Google search on how to get your app noticed yields dozens upon dozens of articles talking primarily about "discoverability." 

When the analytics provider Distimo released new data about apps in December, it rightly concluded that the exploding growth in the marketplace makes it more difficult for new developers to have their work discovered. Last July, the new Apptrace tool found that 400,000 of the then-650,000 iOS apps were “zombies” that had not been downloaded even once. (devsbuild.it)