UIAppearance not taking effect on UILabels created programmatically

Question

We have extended UILabel to be able to apply standard fonts and colors for all uses of a given label type in our apps. Eg.

@interface UILabelHeadingBold : UILab         


        

Answer 1

From Apple documentation :

To support appearance customization, a class must conform to the UIAppearanceContainer protocol and relevant accessor methods must be marked with UI_APPEARANCE_SELECTOR.

For example in UINavigationBar.h, tintColor is marked with UI_APPEARANCE_SELECTOR

@property(nonatomic,retain) UIColor *tintColor UI_APPEARANCE_SELECTOR;

But in UILabel.h you can see that the textColor and font propertys are not marked with UI_APPEARANCE_SELECTOR but somehow it works when added in Interface Builder (following the documentation it shouldn't work at all).