iOS Blur View

iOS 7's blur effect for an entire UIView. Apple created iOS 7 with all of these wonderful blurred views, and yet left us without a way to use that blur effect on our own views. Taking matters into my own hands, I created a way -

Preview

Trick of the trade, and How To Use

Looking through what Apple did give me to use, I found and used an UIToolbar. Setting it as a sublayer of a view, clearing the view's background color, and resizing the toolbar gives the desired effect. Also, this implementation allows for changing the view's tint color and opacity

Using Storyboards

• Drag a UIView out to your Storyboard onto the desired view controller
• Set in the Utilities pane your custom class (for the UIView) to be JWBlurView
• Ctrl+drag to your view controller to create a property outlet for that new JWBlurView (named "blurView" in this example)

Creating Programmatically

• Create a property for that new JWBlurView (named "blurView" in this example)
• In ViewDidLoad or ViewWillAppear

[self setBlurView:[JWBlurView new]]; // create a new blur view
[[self blurView] setFrame:CGRectMake(0.0f,0.0f,200.0f,300.0f)]; // set the frame to whatever you desire
[[self blurView] setAutoresizingMask:UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleWidth|UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleHeight]; // optional
[self.view addSubview:[self blurView]]; // add the blur view as subview

Handy Instance Functions

- (void) setBlurColor:(UIColor *)blurColor; // sets overall blurred view's tint color, if opacity > 0.0
- (void) setBlurAlpha:(CGFloat)alphaValue;  // sets the view's opacity (blurred to solid)

Notes

• Open and free to use! I'd always appreciate a star for the repo if you use it though
• It requires an iOS 7 UIToolbar, which means...it will only work on iOS 7.
• If the opacity is set at 0 the tint color won't show. Adjust the opacity of the blur view, even just a little more than 0, for it to show the tint.