How can I set the tintColor of a UIBarButtonItem via the appearance protocol?

Question

I'm trying to programatically set the tintColor for UIBarButtonItems throughout my project. I'm calling:

[UIBarButtonItem appearance]

However, after looking at Apple's documentation here: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/uikit/reference/UIBarButtonItem_Class/Reference/Reference.html

I found no such properties for setting the tintColor. The closest related methods I could find were:

setBackgroundImage:forState:barMetrics:
setBackgroundImage:forState:style:barMetrics:

However, both of these methods are for setting an actual background image. Is it not possible to simply set the button's tintColor via UIAppearance?

Answer 1

Maybe I dont understand the question correctly. But if you look in the link that you've posted, under Tasks -> Customizing Appearance, there's a property called tintColor.

You just have to set that property to the desired color

[[UIBarButtonItem appearance] setTintColor:[UIColor redColor]];

Is this not working for you?

Answer 2

As per the UIAppearance Protocol, you can set the tintColor as below :

To customize the appearances for instances of a class when contained within an instance of a container class, or instances in a hierarchy, you use appearanceWhenContainedIn: to get the appearance proxy for the class

[[UIBarButtonItem appearanceWhenContainedIn:[UINavigationBar class], nil]
       setTintColor:myNavBarColor];

This is mentioned here , if that's what you are looking for.