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

A workaround that I've used is to manually apply the color from the appearance that is set:

let label = UILabel()
label.textColor = UILabel.appearance().textColor

This way you don't need to reference anything new, or explicitly define the color. This also works for context specific coloring:

label.textColor = UILabel.appearance(whenContainedInInstancesOf:[MyView.self]).textColor