UIButton with background image highlighted state wrong - ios

I'm trying to use the standard highlighting logic for a UIButton but set the background image for the Normal state. When do this programmatically everything works fine, but when my button is set in Interface Builder I get the following results:
Has anyone run in this where the standard highlighting is changing the way the background image looks? Just to be clear I want the color change, just not the squared off corners on the left.

Figured it out. Apparently if my button size is smaller than the background image it scales appropriately for Normal State, but the highlighted state causes this strangeness. Good to know since I'm attempting to use a single image and just scale it for all of my various buttons.
In this case my IB button was set as 77pt wide, but my image is 97pt wide. It finally looks correct with my IB button set at 90pt wide or larger.

Related

Custom Drawn UIButton

I need to have a circular UIButton that draws a custom color in the middle, along with an outer ring that is drawn as the default tint color (similar to a UIColorWell).
I've tried a few different approaches:
Using a multicolor SFSymbol: This would be an elegant solution, but as far as I can tell there's no way to apply the tint color to just a part of the image while setting the center to be a custom color. Either the entire image is tinted, or the image is drawn as the default colors set in the symbol file. Also, I need to support iOS 14, while the new hierarchical options that may allow me to accomplish this were added to iOS 15.
Setting various layer properties (ie, cornerRadius, borderColor, etc): This works and may be a decent fallback solution, but I'm unable to get the look that I'm going for (namely, having a transparent ring between the outer border and inner colored circle).
If there's a way to use either of the above options, please educate me! Either one seems like a better solution than:
Overloading the draw function: This is the option I'm going with at the moment, as it allows me to have complete creative control over the look of the button. The rest of this post will be regarding this method.
So far I was able to get the button to be drawn exactly as I wanted. However, I am unable to figure out how to draw the button appropriately with regards to various state changes.
For example, if a popover is displayed, all of the normal buttons are automatically redrawn as disabled. My custom button, however, isn't redrawn so I am unable to respond to the state change.
Same thing with tapping on the button - normal buttons are briefly shown in an emphasized color but my custom button doesn't respond.
Does someone have an example as to how to support overriding UIButton drawing with various states?
I was able to get the desired behavior by overriding tintColorDidChange in order to trigger a redraw of the button. Now I am able to draw the outer ring in the correct color (including grayed out when a popover is displayed) while maintaining the desired inner color.

UIbutton partially transparent?

I want a customized button with my own background. The thing is, though I've set the background of the PNG file to transparent, the transparent part was still included in xcode, showing the bigger border. Any idea to solve this problem? In this simple demo I need the black part only. I created this button in xib, and imageView has this problem too. Thanks.
When you set the background image of the button, it took the PNG file you chose and made that the background image. If you have alpha (transparent) space on your PNG file, it still counts as pixels adding to the size of your image. They're just clear pixels. You'll need to edit your PNG file to be just the black part that you want, removing the alpha.
A tip, when making custom buttons with background images, click off of the button to deselect it, then click the button to select it again (Just to make sure. After you select a file, even though the button looks selected, your hotkeys are affecting the attribute inspector, not the button), then hit cmd + =. This will auto size the button to be the size of the image that you added as the background image. If you don't do this, you'll probably see distorted images, since the default is to change the aspect to fill the button's image view.
Set the opaque flag on the button to false.

Image Automatically Resized In Run-time But Not On Interface Builder

Alright, this is struggling me by now. I have a PNG image which has the size of 10x36px.
When I try to use that in any of my views it gets resized. Not the frame property, this one remains intact. But visually the image is not the same.
The real image is like this . (Sorry if you can barely see it. That's because it has a white background on a white foreground).
But when I am in the simulator (it happens on a device too) it looks like this.
.
I'm not using contraints(I turned off AutoLayout in order to find the bug).
I printed the frame of that button and it's width, height, x and y values are just as they are in the interface builder. And I printed them everywhere and in response to different events too(I know, that's not the reason. I'm just desperate).
This happens only with this PNG specifically cause other UIButton I have in the very same view, but with differents Images, are working just fine.
What could be the cause of this error?
EDIT:
Trying as a background image it got better. But still not perfect.
Place the png image inside an empty 36x36 png image in Photoshop/Pixelmator to stop it resizing and preserve the original ratio.
Or try setting the views content mode to "aspect fit" in Interface Builder or programmatically:
yourImageView.contentMode = UIViewContentModeScaleAspectFit;
The cause could be that UIBarButtons treat images differently than UIButtons. UIBarButtons are typically used in UINavigationBars or UIToolbars while UIButtons are used typically in the View.
Make sure you are using Button background image and not Button image.
Button background image covers the whole button background.
Button image places the images on a portion of the background.
Also, use xcassets. It comes with the project template. If you don't have it (deleted it), add a new one and create an image set. Once you do that, add your images. Make sure to select "Render as original image" for each image in your image set.
The PNG image you linked to isn't 10x36 pixels, but 10x30. Oops?

resetting the background image of a UITextField doesn't work

Setting a custom background image (for iOS < 5) in the style of a tinted rounded rect text field works fine,
yet I can't change it back to normal or not even to another background image, once it's set.
I'm calling setBackground:nil and setBorderStyle:UITextBorderStyleRoundedRect on the view in order to reset it.
There is some effect: The edge of the border gets slightly lighter, as if the desired view is drawn behind it, but it's not set back to the normal appearance. Calling setNeedsDisplay doesn't help either.
Am I missing another property?

Custom the backgroud of a UIButton or UIBarButtonItem on segControl & bars

I'm trying to change the appearance of my UIButtons int the view as well as UIBarButtonItems in the NaviBar or toolBar or SegControl.
And here are 2 questions.
NO.1. How can I set customed background pictures to the buttons I mentioned while I can change their titles programmaticly? I mean I found that if I set the background of a button, the title seems to be concealed by the background image?
NO.2. I tried to add the text of the title directly on the png, ( which is actually a imperfect way since I need to change the title during the runtime). Anyway it works out both the image and the text, but the resolution seems to be reduced because the text became sort of blurred.
Can anyone give me some advices how to achieve it? Thanks a lot!
NO.1 The button title should not be obscured by the background image. Are you setting the button's image in code like this:
[btn setBackgroundImage:image forState:UIControlStateNormal];
? You may be instead setting the button's image property (which is different from its background image).
NO.2 You really don't want to be adding text to the button PNG, for the exact reason you mention. Buttons in iOS are designed to display images and text the way you want - put your energy into getting the built-in buttons working the way they should. There are umpteen billion tutorials out there about how to do this.

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