Emulating the native shadow on UIMenuController

August 22nd, 2011 § Comments Off on Emulating the native shadow on UIMenuController § permalink

I’m an iOS developer! I still love and will continue doing front-end dev for web but I’m adding another feather to my cap in the way of working on some pretty cool iOS apps. One app I’ve worked on is Constellation, an eBook reader developed for Ashford Education. It’s pretty cool.

One of the things we do is emulate the UIMenuController with our own more powerful view controller. And one of the neat things about a UIMenuController is that you get a slick, subtle drop shadow wherever it is placed. Being the guy I am I spent some time to analyze the drop shadow in Photoshop and do my best to emulate it. Here’s what I came up with. Have a better solution? Tell me in the comments!

- (void) viewDidLoad
{
	[super viewDidLoad];
	
	self.view.layer.shadowColor = [[UIColor blackColor] CGColor];
	self.view.layer.shadowOffset = CGSizeMake(0, 2.0f);
	self.view.layer.shadowOpacity = .55f;
	self.view.layer.shadowRadius = 2.0f;
	self.view.layer.shouldRasterize = YES; 
}