Completely customized UI in iOS 7

Question

Assume you have to develop an app, which needs a completely customized user interface so that you can not use any standard UI objects in Xcode.

How would you proceed to create such an user interface? Would you use the interface builder? Would you create something like a master parent UIView? What are the best practices to achieve this? What would be the most elegant solution with less code duplication?

Answer 1

If by "complete customization" you mean the look and feel of the app,
then I suggest to design the IB objects you require using some design IDE's such as photoshop and then use those slices for your project.

This is the best option I find so far to get a complete customized look with minimal code, and by minimal, I mean you don't actually require any coding. You can do this complete customization within your Interface builder.

However, I don't think you can completely ignore standard UI objects as you require them to add basic functionality.

If customized controls are what you are looking for, then I suggest you to create separate custom control classes so that they can be reused anywhere in your project, or in other projects too.
Here are two wonderful tutorials on custom controls:

• http://www.raywenderlich.com/36288/how-to-make-a-custom-control
• http://www.raywenderlich.com/56885/custom-control-for-ios-tutorial-a-reusable-knob

Hope this helps!