Two Different Color Schemes for 1 Storyboard

Question

I have nice little app that I am wanting to release on app store, but I want it to have more than 1 option as far as color scheme goes. I've built the app using a single storyboard and Xcode 5. I've had a suggestion of storing separate plists for each color scheme in my Xcode project and then reading key value pairs to assign colors to the elements, but I am not sure where to begin to do this. Also, when I look at my info.plist for my project, I don't see any lines that refer to the storyboard elements. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your time!

Answer 1

You should not be using info.plist for this. You can add additional custom plist files, which can hold data. You can then read these files into NSDictionary objects and use the data to set the colors and/or other UI related settings. This is a good idea, because you can then add or edit color schemes without touching the code. You should read tutorials on property lists.

Once you have set up your UI elements and have decided what is colored how (independent of the actual colors), you would map these understandings to the dictionary. For example, key: BarButtonItemsColor value: #FF0000, key: NavigationBarColors value: #00FF00. In this example, bar button items are mapped to a key, as are navigation bars. Now you need code to read this mapping and implement the actual tinting. I recommend using UIAppearance proxies. Now, you can create several plist files with different colors (and basically add as many plist themes as you want), without actually changing the code of the parser method, which reads a plist and knows which key influences what UI elements. In this example, I used hex color format for ease.

Answer 2

If you're using standard UI you can simply use tintColor application wide property. This way everything will be changed to the color user selected.

If you want to go full customization and not just tint color I would recommend the following. Save configuration for your color schemes in NSDefaults. In that configuration save different properties and colors for different type of controls. For example for all buttons you save colors you want to apply to currentTitleColor and tintColor.

Then traverse all views in your application using subviews property of the main window and detect what kind of control each view is (this way you don't need to save anywhere list of your controls - you just walk through all of them in run-time). Based on the type of control - assign different properties using your defaults.