wave2future / bctabbarcontroller

a Tweetie-style tab bar for the iPhone

BCTabBarController

BCTabBarController is a Tweetie-style tab bar for iPhone. See below for screenshots.

Why?

There are several problems with using the standard UITabBarController including:

• It is too tall, especially in landscape mode
• The height doesn't match the UIToolbar
• It cannot be customized without using private APIs
• It has labels. Sometimes you don't need labels.

BCTabBarController is completely written from scratch using public APIs to fix all of these problems and behaves almost identically to a normal UITabBarController.

Features

• A cool little arrow that slides around to indicate the current tab
• Support for all orientations
• Same height as a standard UIToolbar

Usage

• Add BCTabBarController.xcodeproj to your project by dragging it into the Groups & Files sidebar.
• Select the added project file in the sidebar and then check the box next to libBCTabBarController.a
• Select your project's target and right-click and choose "Get Info"
• Click the + icon underneath Direct Dependencies and add the BCTabBarController target
• libBCTabBarController.a should already be in the list of Linked Libraries
• Drag BCTabBarController.bundle into your project's resources
• If you haven't already, add the QuartzCore and Core Graphics frameworks to your project
• Define the method - (NSString *)iconImageName in each view controller that you add to the tab bar. It should return the filename of the grey tab icon (see creation steps below)
• See the example target for usage

Creating icons

Unlike UITabBarController, the tab bar icons in BCTabBars are have two pre-rendered states (four if you count the retina versions). You can use the provided tab.psd file to create those files.

• Replace the layer masks in the PSD with the silhouette of the icon you wish to create
• Save the grey layer as name.png and the blue layer as name-selected.png and add them to your project.

Screenshots

Acknowledgements

This controller wouldn't be possible without the original innovative design of Tweetie by Loren Brichter (atebits).