Building with iOS7 produces iOS6 looking widgets

Question

After moving to XCode 5 and the iOS7 base SDK, some of the UI widgets in my app still look like iOS6-style (gradients, frames) on iOS7 devices. This doesn't happen on the equivalent emulator for iOS7. This also doesn't happen for all widgets, UIDocumentInteractionController's popup looks like iOS7 on device, but UIPopoverController doesn't. The keyboard for renaming a file also shows this discrepancy between emulator and device.

How does iOS determine the visual style of UI elements? Is it based on a statically linked library or something determined at runtime? I've tried purging the app from the device completely, but no change.

Emulator for retina iPad: UIPopoverController

iPad 3rd gen with iOS 7: UIPopoverController

The code in this case is fairly straightforward, no customization of the rendering or layout.

self.poController = [[UIPopoverController alloc] initWithContentViewController:audioCopyController];
[audioCopyController showDoneButton:NO];
audioCopyController.view.frame = CGRectMake(0,0,350,250);
_poController.popoverContentSize = audioCopyController.view.bounds.size;
_poController.delegate = self;
[_poController presentPopoverFromRect:view.audiocopyButton.frame
                                           inView:view
                         permittedArrowDirections:UIPopoverArrowDirectionDown
                                         animated:YES];

Thanks for the help in advance.

Answer 1

Ok, I found out what the problem was. David's suggestion got me thinking.

I am maintaining multiple apps at the same time, and one of them is quite old. The new Interface Builder in XCode5 breaks the transparency for a lot of the fields in the old app so I was keeping XCode4 in a separate installation folder alongside of XCode5. It seems that somehow my XCode5 project was still pointing at the SDK folders of XCode4 (not sure how this was possible, looking at the actual linker command line would probably shed some light), so after deleting XCode4's 6.1 SDK folder from my machine, a clean build with XCode 5 produced the correct iOS 7-looking widgets in my iOS-supported app.

The moral of the story is, be very careful with multiple XCode/SDK installations on the same machine. Hopefully this can help other folks who may be trying something similar to provide support for legacy apps.

Answer 2

Check you Project config file and Target config file. It is probably set with an iOS 6.X base SDK.

For this:

• Go to your project config file in Xcode 5
• Click the Build Settings tab
• Edit the base SDK field to switch it to iOS 7.

Sometimes, we've experienced issues with Xcode not taking the current setting into account.

Changing it and compiling helps it understand that it needs to be changed.

Make sure you configure this correctly for your Project config and each and every target config file you run this from.

You might well have 2 different targets for simulator and for your devices.

Hope this helps Regards

David