How can I get the iOS 7 default blue color programmatically?

ios colors ios7 uicolor

153,056

Solution 1

Use self.view.tintColor from a view controller, or self.tintColor from a UIView subclass.

Solution 2

It appears to be [UIColor colorWithRed:0.0 green:122.0/255.0 blue:1.0 alpha:1.0].

screenshot showing Colors window

Solution 3

iOS 7 default blue color is R:0.0 G:122.0 B:255.0

UIColor *ios7BlueColor = [UIColor colorWithRed:0.0 green:122.0/255.0 blue:1.0 alpha:1.0];

Solution 4

According to the documentation for UIButton:

In iOS v7.0, all subclasses of UIView derive their behavior for tintColor from the base class. See the discussion of tintColor at the UIView level for more information.

Assuming you don't change the tintColor before grabbing the default value, you can use:

self.view.tintColor

Solution 5

Here is a simple method to get the default system tint color:

+ (UIColor*)defaultSystemTintColor
{
   static UIColor* systemTintColor = nil;
   static dispatch_once_t onceToken;
   dispatch_once(&onceToken, ^{
      UIView* view = [[UIView alloc] init];
      systemTintColor = view.tintColor;
   });
   return systemTintColor;
}

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153,056

Joel H.

After receiving my B.S. in Computer Science from Florida State, I moved to DC and have been working in the software development field since 2009. I've worked mostly with Ruby On Rails, Java and iOS. There is always more to learn in the software field, so I'm very thankful that StackOverflow exists. I also love playing music, writing poetry and blogging!

Updated on July 08, 2022

Comments

Joel H. almost 2 years

I'm creating custom elements in my app and want to match the look and feel of the new iOS. iOS 7 introduced to us a very common lighter blue color, the default color or tint for several elements, including the system button, segmented control, etc. They've made it easy to select the color using IB, as seen here:

However, I haven't found how to easily access the color programmatically. I checked out the UIColor documentation, and there doesn't seem to be any accessor for the blue system color in the class itself.

Here's my question: does a simple accessor exist for this color? [UIColor ?] or something like it? If not, does someone know the exact RGB values for that color?
Joel H. over 10 years

Interestingly, the default blue on my system appears to be 0:128:255 (using the same tool). I wonder if Apple changed it recently?
Radim Köhler over 10 years

Please, try to read this stackoverflow.com/help/deleted-answers, to get more understanding how to not answer. Namely: "Answers that do not fundamentally answer the question": barely more than a link to an external site
Jason Moore over 10 years

And if you prefer hex: 0x007aff
Richard J. Ross III over 10 years

@JoelH. Check the color space you're currently using.
Adil Malik over 10 years

Why is it needed to write /255.0 with each rgb value?
malhal over 10 years

you don't need dispatch once for main thread stuff. A simple if nil will suffice.
malhal over 10 years

Because colours on macs are a float between 0.0 and 1.0.
Rick about 10 years

Why assume the method will only be called from the main thread? The overhead to dispatch_once is quite low and is a single if check in the common case.
Zev Eisenberg almost 10 years

Be careful in how you use this, as it may change in subsequent iOS releases.
Andrey Tarantsov almost 10 years

@Rick Because UIKit APIs are not background thread-safe, so calling it outside the main thread is not allowed anyway.
Rick almost 10 years

@AndreyTarantsov that is true, but it is safe to use UIColor on multiple threads. Wrapping it in a dispatch_once allows for safely retrieving this color on any thread. And again, the overhead is very low.
Andrey Tarantsov almost 10 years

@Rick I understand about the overhead. But you're not just touching UIColor, you're creating an UIView here, which, to the best of my knowledge, is not safe to do on non-main threads. (I may be mistaken, though; I'm not sure where it is documented to check.)
Rick almost 10 years

@AndreyTarantsov from a quick test it seems to work fine. From the UIVIew documentation: "Manipulations to your application’s user interface must occur on the main thread. Thus, you should always call the methods of the UIView class from code running in the main thread of your application. The only time this may not be strictly necessary is when creating the view object itself but all other manipulations should occur on the main thread."
Andrey Tarantsov almost 10 years

@Rick A quick test does not really help here. However, the docs seem to indicate that your usage is probably fine. So I'm receding my complaint, and I'll just leave a general advise to avoid things that are asking for trouble.
Cliff Helsel over 9 years

Looks like the safest way to grab the color.
SimplGy about 9 years

This works for me. My sharedApplication() does not have a keyWindow with tintColor
malhal about 9 years

self.view.tintColor more likely
prewett almost 9 years

This isn't very future proof--if Apple changes the default tint color or lets users set default tint color your app won't get the correct color.
Nicolas Miari over 8 years

Yes, definitely not a good idea to hard-code any value that could potentially change. Especially when there is an API to query the actual value.
daleijn over 8 years

and in another system: #007AFF
ta.speot.is over 8 years

Uh how'd we get from blue to red in + (instancetype)iOS7redColor;
Jervisbay about 8 years

In Swift: let defaultTintColor = UIColor(red: 0.0, green: 122/255, blue: 1.0, alpha: 1)
Dan Rosenstark about 8 years

I was going to say that you can just use UIView().tintColor, but in fact you cannot. Not sure at what point the UIView gets the tint color set...
Aaron Brager about 8 years

@DanRosenstark I think the UIWindow or maybe its root view has the original version. Views inherit their tint color from higher views in the responder chain, but in your example the new view has no superview.
timgcarlson about 8 years

Feels a bit dirty, but it's better than hardcoding a link color that may change over time.
Nicolas Miari over 7 years

self.view.tintColor from within UIViewController.viewDidLoad() gives the right blue.
Doug Amos over 6 years

Swift version UIColor(red: 0.0, green: 122.0/255.0, blue: 1.0, alpha: 1.0)
Dmitry Kozlov over 5 years

This one will create UIButton every time you ask for systemBlue its better to init this color once. Using internal word in internal extension is not user friendly. Same for using class instead of static. And calling it "Blue" is not right, cause this color can be changed later like in macOS Mojave. So static let system = UIView().tintColor! is still much better than your variant.
Stanislau Baranouski over 5 years

@DmitryKozlov you right, better to use static due memory performance. Thanks for pointing to that. But Calling it "blue" still works up to iOS 12 and it's not related to macOS at all. For macOS you have to deal with NSColor type.
Stanislau Baranouski over 5 years

I strongly not recommend you to use forced unwrapping, since it could cause application crash, if default behavior of UIKit Framework will be changed in any next version. Also getting tint color from an UIView instance couldn't guarantee that this color is a system tint color.
Dmitry Kozlov about 5 years

@StanislauBaranouski Why they should change that? Please explain your point
Stanislau Baranouski about 5 years

no need explanation here, it's just a bad practice to use forced unwrapping, especially if you can avoid it.