Adding View Effects in iOS 8

Mike Bluestein

In iOS 8, Apple has added UIKit level support for effects such as blur and vibrancy. These effects are seen in system-level UIs such as the blur effect shown when opening a folder or swiping to the lock screen, and can now be added to your own applications with just a few lines of code.

view effects

Blur Effect

The first effect you can use is the blur effect, represented by the UIBlurEffect class. Adding a blur effect is easy. Create a UIBlurEffect and a UIVisualEffectView from the effect. Then just add the effect view to the view hierarchy.

For example, the following code adds a blur effect:

var blur = UIBlurEffect.FromStyle (UIBlurEffectStyle.Light);
var blurView = new UIVisualEffectView (blur) {
  Frame = new RectangleF (0, 0, imageView.Frame.Width, 400)
};

View.Add (blurView);

This code dynamically blurs the content beneath it. For instance, when added to a view hierarchy containing a scrollable image, the effect of the blur changes at runtime as the image is moved:

blur

The blur effect comes in three styles:

  • UIBlurEffectStyle.Light
  • UIBlurEffectStyle.ExtraLight
  • UIBlurEffectStyle.Dark

These change the appearance of the blur as shown below:

blur style

Vibrancy Effect

In addition to blur, iOS includes a vibrancy effect (UIVibrancyEffect), which allows content displayed over a blur to remain legible. Vibrancy effects are created from blur effects, and are also displayed using a UIVisualEffectView. Any view the effect should be applied to is added as a subview of the UIVisualEffectView‘s ContentView.

For example, the following code adds a label to be displayed over the blurred view created above:

// vibrancy view
var frame = new Rectangle (10, 10, 100, 50);
var vibrancy = UIVibrancyEffect.FromBlurEffect (blur);
var vibrancyView = new UIVisualEffectView (vibrancy) {
  Frame = frame
};

label = new UILabel {
  Text = "Hello iOS 8!",
  Frame = vibrancyView.Bounds
};

vibrancyView.ContentView.Add (label);
blurView.ContentView.Add (vibrancyView);

When the user scrolls the image, the blur changes and the label’s text is modified dynamically such that it remains readable:

vibrancy

These effects are useful when you want them applied dynamically. Of course, rendering them has some cost, so if you can get the results you are looking for with a static effect, that should be used. However, for creating a level of polish, with a sense of depth on par with iOS itself, it’s nice to now have these features available.

The code from this post is available here.

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