Hooray, Apple has decided to lift the long-in-the-tooth NDA on the iPhone SDK!

I can’t imagine anyone will be hearing that news from this blog first, but I do want to acknowledge and take advantage of it. My last post felt a bit vague, even to me, about my definition of “iPhone black” and that was partly due to dancing around the NDA. While it was really tempting to be provocative, I felt it would be irresponsible for my current contract work to risk getting smacked with an NDA violation (even though I have yet to hear of an instance) and have the client’s product suffer as a result. I considered screenshots, but felt they were either singling out someone else’s application, or a simplistic straw man if I just used an Interface Builder mockup.

The definition I had in mind of “iPhone black UI” is not simply “any view whose background is black”; it is a UINavigationController whose UINavigationBar's barStyle is UIBarStyleBlackOpaque (instead of UIBarStyleDefault) and is controlling a UITableViewController whose controlled UITableView's rows have either a white or black background. If a UIToolbar is present, its barStyle is also UIBarStyleBlackOpaque. I think most people understood that, but I still prefer to be explicit.

Wow, that feels great to type all those UI* prefixes in public—I encourage everyone to do so!