iOS 7 Development Tips, Tricks & Hacks

iOS 7 Development Tips, Tricks & Hacks
September 18, 2013
Like with any new iOS version there are a bunch of new tricks and hacks to work out. Here are a few things that weren't immediately obvious to me, it's in no way a complete set, just things that I happened to come across.
If you've got any more then send them to me on Twitter or by email and I'll add them here with full credit to you.
Stealing The Blur
Unfortunately Apple didn't give access to their blur effect directly for you to use on your views. Luckily some clever people worked out you could just steal the layer from a UIToolbar. iOS-blur
If you want dark style blur set the toolbar barStyle to UIBarStyleBlack.
Tinting The Navbar
Setting the tint color but it's not tinting? Turns out there's another tint property called 'barTintColor';
   self.navigationController.navigationBar.barTintColor = [UIColor blueColor];
Nil Those Delegates
With iOS 7 you need to nil out your delegates and datasources before your controllers are dealloc'd or you will have a lot of nasty 'message sent to deallocated instance' exceptions.
    - (void)dealloc
    {
        self.tableView.delegate = nil;
        self.tableView.dataSource = nil;
    }
Hide The Status Bar
Don't you love how that transparent status bar floats over content? Yeah me either.
The standard call doesn't do the trick any more:
   [[UIApplication sharedApplication] setStatusBarHidden:YES withAnimation:UIStatusBarAnimationFade]
Set the value UIViewControllerBasedStatusBarAppearance to YES in your Info.plist and add this to your controller:
    - (BOOL)prefersStatusBarHidden
    {
        return YES;
    }
Changing The Status Bar Style Per Controller
Set the value UIViewControllerBasedStatusBarAppearance to YES in your Info.plist and override:
 - (UIStatusBarStyle)preferredStatusBarStyle
 {
     return UIStatusBarStyleLightContent;
 }
Custom Back Button And Swipe Back
The only nice way I found to actually completely override the back button is to set the leftBarButtonItem, but then the swipe back gesture breaks. Luckily it's an easy fix when you know how:
    self.navigationItem.leftBarButtonItem = [[UIBarButtonItem alloc]
                                             initWithImage:img
                                             style:UIBarButtonItemStylePlain
                                             target:self
                                             action:@selector(onBack:)];
    self.navigationController.interactivePopGestureRecognizer.delegate = (id<UIGestureRecognizerDelegate>)self;
Full Screen Content Transition
When full screen content is shown (say a video is expanded) and the user switches orientation and then closes you will often get an exception. Turns out preferredInterfaceOrientationForPresentation is now a required method.
    - (UIInterfaceOrientation)preferredInterfaceOrientationForPresentation
    {
        return UIInterfaceOrientationPortrait;
    }
Checking For iOS 7
Nothing new here, but useful if you want to perform something only on iOS 7:
    if ([[[UIDevice currentDevice] systemVersion] floatValue] >= 7.0) {
        ...
    } 
My Scroll View Is Moving!
iOS 7 offsets your scroll view 64px (20px for the status bar and 44px for the navigation bar) by default, you can disable this though:
  self.automaticallyAdjustsScrollViewInsets = NO;
CocoaPods Is Breaking in Xcode 5
Check out this link.