Iphone UITabBarItems titles overlap

Question

in my app i use a navigation controller and a tabBar for my views. The problem is that the titles that i have for the views are a little too long to fit.. they appear like in the photo below. alt text http://img17.imageshack.us/img17/1524/picture2usx.png

could someone give any suggestions for resolving this problem? i tried subclassing UITabBarItem but i can't add a label as a subview, i can't change the font or size.. it looks ok when i have only 4 buttons but that is not ok because i need that more button. cutting down the names is not an option either, i don't think apple would like that.

thank you in advance.

Answer 1

As far as I can tell, there is no way to do what you want to do easily.

You could build some of the name string into your icon image. This will of course force you to internationalize your icon images, and you will also end up with the blue coloring in some of your text.

You could have no titles at all, and overlay your font-scaled title by drawing on the containing view. Note that when there is no title in the tab bar item, the following page will also have no title in the title bar.

Better by far, if you can do it, is to shorten the names. I know this is tough in German, but surely there must be alternatives.

I hope that Apple improves this in 4.0, but as those fonts are already fairly small, I sort of doubt it.