Ios – Creating a left-arrow button (like UINavigationBar’s “back” style) on a UIToolbar

cocoa-touchiosiphoneuinavigationbaruitoolbar

I'd love to create a "back" left-arrow-bezel button in a UIToolbar.

As far as I can tell, the only way to get one of these is to leave UINavigationController at default settings and it uses one for the left bar item. But there's no way I can find to create one as a UIBarButtonItem, so I can't make one in a standard UIToolbar, even though they're very similar to UINavigationBars.

I could manually create it with button images, but I can't find the source images anywhere. They have alpha-channel edges, so screenshotting and cutting won't get very versatile results.

Any ideas beyond screenshotting for every size and color scheme I intend to use?

Update: PLEASE STOP dodging the question and suggesting that I shouldn't be asking this and should be using UINavigationBar. My app is Instapaper Pro. It shows only a bottom toolbar (to save space and maximize readable content area), and I wish to put a left-arrow-shaped Back button in the bottom.

Telling me that I shouldn't need to do this is not an answer and certainly doesn't deserve a bounty.

Best Answer

I used the following psd that I derived from http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/?p=447

http://www.chrisandtennille.com/pictures/backbutton.psd

I then just created a custom UIView that I use in the customView property of the toolbar item.

Works well for me.

Edit: As pointed out by PrairieHippo, maralbjo found that using the following, simple code did the trick (requires custom image in bundle) should be combined with this answer. So here is additional code:

// Creates a back button instead of default behaviour (displaying title of previous screen)
UIBarButtonItem *backButton = [[UIBarButtonItem alloc] initWithImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"back_arrow.png"]
                                                               style:UIBarButtonItemStyleBordered
                                                              target:self
                                                              action:@selector(backAction)];

tipsDetailViewController.navigationItem.leftBarButtonItem = backButton;
[backButton release];
Related Topic