There is no simple way to do this, you basically need to subclass UITabBar and implement custom drawing to do what you want. It is quite a bit of work for the effect, but it may be worth it. I recommend filing a bug with Apple to get it added to a future iPhone SDK.
I have an addendum to the final answer. While the essential scheme is correct, the trick of using a partially transparent color can be improved upon. I assume that it's only for letting the default gradient to show through. Oh, also, the height of the TabBar is 49 pixels rather than 48, at least in OS 3.
So, if you have a appropriate 1 x 49 image with a gradient, this is the version of viewDidLoad you should use:
Another solution (which is a hack) is to set the alpha on the tabBarController to 0.01 so that it is virtually invisible yet still clickable. Then set a an ImageView control on the bottom of the MainWindow nib with your custom tabbar image underneath the alpha'ed tabBarCOntroller. Then swap the images, change colors or hightlight when the tabbarcontroller switches views.
However, you lose the '...more' and customize functionality.
There are some good ideas in the existing answers, many work slightly differently and what you choose will also depend on which devices you target and what kind of look you're aiming to achieve. UITabBar is notoriously unintuitive when it come to customizing its appearance, but here are a few more tricks that may help:
1). If you're looking to get rid of the glossy overlay for a more flat look do:
tabBar.backgroundColor = [UIColor darkGrayColor]; // this will be your background
[tabBar.subviews[0] removeFromSuperview]; // this gets rid of gloss
2). To set custom images to the tabBar buttons do something like:
for (UITabBarItem *item in tabBar.items){
[item setFinishedSelectedImage:selected withFinishedUnselectedImage:unselected];
[item setImageInsets:UIEdgeInsetsMake(6, 0, -6, 0)];
}
Where selected and unselected are UIImage objects of your choice. If you'd like them to be a flat colour, the simplest solution I found is to create a UIView with the desired backgroundColor and then just render it into a UIImage with the help of QuartzCore. I use the following method in a category on UIView to get a UIImage with the view's contents:
This lets you do some adjustments, but still quite limited. Particularly, you cannot freely modify where the text is placed within the button, and cannot have different colours for selected/unselected buttons. If you want to do more specific text layout, just set UITextAttributeTextColor to be clear and add your text into the selected and unselected images from part (2).
// this code need to be placed on home page of tabbar
for(UITabBarItem *item in self.tabBarController.tabBar.items) {
item.image = [item.image imageWithRenderingMode:UIImageRenderingModeAlwaysOriginal];
}
Above iOS 10:
// this need to be in appdelegate didFinishLaunchingWithOptions
[[UITabBar appearance] setUnselectedItemTintColor:[UIColor blackColor]];