Button in the center of a tab bar iOS xcode - ios

Question

I think my title is what i am looking for. So, i have a tab bar with 4 view controllers. I started to configure my app within storyboard and i configured my tab bar controller from there. I, also, have declared the names of the view controllers in my appdelegate file. My question is the following. Can i add a button in the middle of my tab bar controller? I searched a lot about that and i didn't find a complete solution. Can i use storyboard to connect my view controllers to the tab bar and also app delegate to declare that button to the center of tab bar? Please help. This is my code so far in app delegate file (anything else is in storyboard, juts the view controllers connected to tabbarcontroller) :
- (BOOL)application:(UIApplication *)application didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:(NSDictionary *)launchOptions
{
Assign tab bar item with titles
UITabBarController *tabBarController = (UITabBarController *)self.window.rootViewController;
tabBarController.selectedIndex = 1;
UITabBar *tabBar = tabBarController.tabBar;
UITabBarItem *tabBarItem1 = [tabBar.items objectAtIndex:0];
UITabBarItem *tabBarItem2 = [tabBar.items objectAtIndex:1];
UITabBarItem *tabBarItem3 = [tabBar.items objectAtIndex:3];
UITabBarItem *tabBarItem4 = [tabBar.items objectAtIndex:4];
tabBarItem1.title = #"Tab1";
tabBarItem2.title = #"Tab2";
tabBarItem3.title = #"Tab3";
tabBarItem4.title = #"Tab4";
[tabBarItem2 setFinishedSelectedImage:[UIImage imageNamed:#"maps_selected.png"] withFinishedUnselectedImage:[UIImage imageNamed:#"maps.png"]];
// Change the tab bar background
UIImage* tabBarBackground = [UIImage imageNamed:#"TAPBARBGR.png"];
[[UITabBar appearance] setBackgroundImage:tabBarBackground];
[[UITabBar appearance] setSelectionIndicatorImage:[UIImage imageNamed:#"tabbar_selected.png"]];
// Change the title color of tab bar items
[[UITabBarItem appearance] setTitleTextAttributes:[NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:
[UIColor whiteColor], UITextAttributeTextColor,
nil] forState:UIControlStateNormal];
UIColor *titleHighlightedColor = [UIColor colorWithRed:153/255.0 green:192/255.0 blue:48/255.0 alpha:1.0];
[[UITabBarItem appearance] setTitleTextAttributes:[NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:
titleHighlightedColor, UITextAttributeTextColor,
nil] forState:UIControlStateHighlighted];
return YES;
}
Thank you.

Answer 1

If you connect 4 pages to the standard UITabbarController it will layout 4 buttons equally dividing the space between them. You don't have any control how they are laid down. You can rearrange them in the storyboard or in the code but with 4 buttons - no button will be in the middle.
You can add 5th button and rearrange it to the 3rd position, so this one will be in the middle of tabbar. Or you can look for 3rd party custom tabbar implementations - there are bunch of them on gitnub and other places. Some of them would have specific middle page that styled differently from others.

Answer 2

Can i add a button in the middle of my tab bar controller?
No.
Assuming that you mean adding a button different from the other tab bar items, then no, UITabBar doesn't provide for this. As explained in the UITabBar documentation, all items in a tab bar are expected to be tab bar items, but you could consider a UIToolbar instead:
Each button in a tab bar is called a tab bar item and is an instance
of the UITabBarItem class. If you instead want to give the user a bar
of buttons that each perform an action, use a UIToolbar object.
From a user experience point of view (IMO) it's probably not a good plan to try to mix tab bar and tool bar functionality.