How to fade out the status bar while not hiding it

Question

iOS Developers will surely knows about the issue about status bar and the famous "slide/hamburger/drawer". The issue is well explained here: http://uxmag.com/articles/adapting-ui-to-ios-7-the-side-menu

I'm using MMDrawerController library and it has a nice hack that lets us to create a dummy status bar just above the container view controller. Unfortunately this doesn't work really good. What's the news? The news is that I stumbled upon an app (Tinder) that perfectly solve this mind blowing issue. I've created a gif that perfectly shows what Tinder does.

You need to wait a few seconds for seeing the gif because there's a bug in it and I don't know how to get rid of. Just wait one/two seconds and you will able to see the gif correctly.

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Anyway, what Tinder does? When the user taps on the top left menu button and begin to swipe right the status bar fades out neatly. And when the view is revert to the original position the status bar will show up again.

I am both happy and a bit sad for this because this means that a way must be to do it but I really don't know how to implement it (perhaps hacking MMDrawerController). Any help will be so much appreciated.

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IMPORTANT

Please pay attention to the fact that the method setStatusBarHidden: will completely hide the status bar, this means that the entire view is with a height -20px. This is obviously not the solution because as you can see from the gif the view is not stretched.

Answer 1

Your main problem is with MMDrawerController. If you'll digg into it you'll find a lot of methods statusbar related such as setShowsStatusBarBackgroundView setStatusBarViewBackgroundColor and more. Something in their code pushes the view up when the statusbar is hidden.

Alternatively you can use another drawer controller or use custom code.

Here's a simple way how to accomplishe this:

ViewControllerA:

-(BOOL)prefersStatusBarHidden
{
    return _hidden;
}
- (void)statusHide
{
    [UIView animateWithDuration:0.4 animations:^() {[self setNeedsStatusBarAppearanceUpdate];
    }completion:^(BOOL finished){}];
}

ViewControllerB: (Container in ViewControllerA)

- (IBAction)move:(UIButton *)sender
{
    parent = (ViewController*)self.parentViewController;
    parent.hidden = !parent.hidden;
    CGRect frame = parent.blueContainer.frame;
    if(parent.hidden)
    {
        frame.origin.x = 150;
    }
    else
    {
        frame.origin.x = 0;
    }

    [UIView animateWithDuration:1 animations:^() {parent.blueContainer.frame = frame;}completion:^(BOOL finished){}];
    [parent statusHide];
}

For iOS 6 compatieblty use:

[[UIApplication sharedApplication] setStatusBarHidden:_hidden withAnimation:UIStatusBarAnimationFade];

The table view and other subviews will stay in their location and won't be pushed up.

Edit:

Adding a NavigationBar:

UINavigationController will alter the height of its UINavigationBar to either 44 points or 64 points, depending on a rather strange and undocumented set of constraints. If the UINavigationController detects that the top of its view’s frame is visually contiguous with its UIWindow’s top, then it draws its navigation bar with a height of 64 points. If its view’s top is not contiguous with the UIWindow’s top (even if off by only one point), then it draws its navigation bar in the “traditional” way with a height of 44 points. This logic is performed by UINavigationController even if it is several children down inside the view controller hierarchy of your application. There is no way to prevent this behavior.

Taken from here

You could very simply subclass UINavigationController and create your own navbar to avoid this annoyness.