How to remove iPad's Popover arrow and its frame border

Question

Basically these are two questions:

1. How to remove iPad's popover view's arrow?

2. is there any way to remove popover's black border?

If not possible, can you suggest a way in iPad to display an UIView (popover) at the top of screen without arrow and border (might be light transparent border), please? thanks a lot.

And I don't think ModalView is a proper option, as it cannot be resized and cannot be dismissed by clicking outside modal view.

Answer 1

AFIK there is no built-in way to specify "no arrow", or to have a popup sans borders.

This a hack, but it basically works. In the context of your view controller that is managed by the popup controller, during viewWillAppear:, get the popup window and remove the first layer, which is what renders the arrow and border:

- (void) viewWillAppear: (BOOL) animated
{
    [super viewWillAppear: animated];

    UIView* v = self.view.superview;
    NSLog( @"%@", NSStringFromClass( [v class]) ); // this should print UIView

    v = v.superview;
    NSLog( @"%@", NSStringFromClass( [v class]) ); // this should print UIPopoverView

    [[v.layer.sublayers objectAtIndex:0] removeFromSuperlayer];
}       

I suppose you could experiment with adding back your own layer that rendered the background/border the way you wanted to.

Answer 2

How to remove iPad's popover view's arrow?

When calling -presentPopoverFromBarButtonItem:permittedArrowDirections:, pass 0 as the second parameter, rather than any of the constants. This isn't documented, but Apple is allowing apps in the App Store when using this setting.

Answer 3

You cannot remove the chrome around the popover. Your best bet is to reimplement the idea of a popover, but using custom code.