UITabBarItem: Overwrite default appearance in subclass - objective-c

Question

I have a weird problem, let me explain: I use [UITabBarItem appearance] to change the font and color of all UITabBarItems in my app. This works like a charm and all UITabBarItems are styled correctly.
The code is:
// Set the normal state
[[UITabBarItem appearance] setTitleTextAttributes:
#{
UITextAttributeTextColor: AUIColorObject
} forState:forState:UIControlStateHighlighted];
Now I want to overwrite that style for a single UITabBar. I extended my UITabBar subclass to handle something like styles, in my case possible values are RootTabBarControllerStyleDefault and RootTabBarControllerStyleBox.
How can I set the TitleTextAttributes for this single UITabBarItem? I use as subclassed UITabBarController and a UITabBar for maximum control.
More detailed, this is my working workaround:
1) UITabBar has as static method to set the appearance, like this:
+ (void)setAppearinaceForStyle:(RootTabBarControllerStyle)_style
{
[[UITabBarItem appearance] setTitleTextAttributes:
#{
UITextAttributeTextColor: (_style == RootTabBarControllerStyleDefault ? UIColor1 : UIColor2)
} forState:UIControlStateHighlighted];
}
2) Then I set up a delegate for my UITabBarController doing the following stuff:
- (void)tabBarController:(UITabBarController *)tabBarController didSelectViewController:(UIViewController *)viewController
{
[RootTabBar setAppearinaceForStyle:RootTabBarControllerStyleBox];
[tabBarController.tabBar setNeedsDisplay];
for (UITabBarItem *item in tabBarController.tabBar.items)
{
NSString *oldString = item.title;
// Change the title string to force a redraw
[item setTitle:[NSString stringWithFormat:#"%# ", item.title]];
// Set the title back to its default value
[item setTitle:oldString];
}
[RootTabBar setAppearinaceForStyle:RootTabBarControllerStyleDefault];
}
This allows me to set the different style for this single UITabBar but I hope there is a better/cleaner way to do this.

Answer 1

So you want to customize differently one of your UITabBarItem's?
If so, you already have a subclass for that single item, just us [MyTabBarItemSubclass appearance] instead of the regular [UITabBarItem appearance] used for the other items.

Answer 2

The [UIAppearance documentation](
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/uikit/reference/UIAppearance_Protocol/Reference/Reference.html) states that:
Use the UIAppearance protocol to get the appearance proxy for a class.
You can customize the appearance of instances of a class by sending
appearance modification messages to the class’s appearance proxy.
Note: iOS applies appearance changes when a view enters a window, it
doesn’t change the appearance of a view that’s already in a window. To
change the appearance of a view that’s currently in a window, remove
the view from the view hierarchy and then put it back.
You should play around with view hierarchy to remove the view that contains the tabbar and putting it again. However, your method is making more or less the same job (a bit less elegantly thus).
I think that te result will be the same if you follow Apple's doc