How to change the highlight colour of tabbar icons? (iPhone/iPad)

Question

I have been looking around online for an answer to this question for several days now with no success. Essentially what I want to do is change the highlight colour of the icons in my UITabBar. By default they are highlighted in blue when selected, however I have seen several apps that have managed to change this (eg. McDonalds app, shown below).

What I would like to be able to do is set the highlight colour to red, if this is even possible please can someone help me?

NOTE: If it makes things any easier I'm targeting this app at users of iOS5+.

Answer 1

You can do this using the appearance proxy, new in iOS 5. In your app delegate's didFinishLaunching method:

[[UITabBar appearance] setSelectedImageTintColor:[UIColor redColor]];

In iOS 7 use:

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

See the UITabBar class reference for more details.

Answer 2

In swift put this:

 UITabBar.appearance().tintColor = UIColor.redColor()

inside of the app delegate's didFinishLaunching method... Just keeping up with the times.