How can I change the text and icon colors for tabBarItems in iOS 7?

Question

How can I change the text and icon colors for UITabBar and UITabBarItems in iOS 7? The default gray text seems dim and hard to read for unselected tabbar items.

Answer 1

There are two things you need to do for this:

1) If you want to customize the TabBar itself, you need to set the barTintColor for the tabBarController:

    // this will generate a black tab bar     tabBarController.tabBar.barTintColor = [UIColor blackColor];      // this will give selected icons and text your apps tint color     tabBarController.tabBar.tintColor = appTintColor;  // appTintColor is a UIColor * 

2) Set the tabBarItem text appearance for each state that you want to override:

[[UITabBarItem appearance] setTitleTextAttributes:@{NSFontAttributeName : [UIFont fontWithName:@"HelveticaNeue-Bold" size:10.0f],                                                     NSForegroundColorAttributeName : appTintColor                                                     } forState:UIControlStateSelected];   // doing this results in an easier to read unselected state then the default iOS 7 one [[UITabBarItem appearance] setTitleTextAttributes:@{NSFontAttributeName : [UIFont fontWithName:@"HelveticaNeue-Bold" size:10.0f],                                                     NSForegroundColorAttributeName : [UIColor colorWithRed:.5 green:.5 blue:.5 alpha:1]                                                     } forState:UIControlStateNormal];