iPhone Status Bar for custom message ala Evernote, In-Call, etc

I am trying to find how to implement a custom message on the status bar, something like the Evernote "Downloading changes..." message seen here.

Is this a private API call? Any suggestions or pointers?

You should have a look at MTStatusBarOverlay.

This pretty much looks like a label put on top of the view there and then the table view right below it , should not be tough to do...

    UILabel *label=...
    label.text=@"My Text"
    //maybe justify here so  its c enters
    //set the rectangle bounds to what they need to be 
//for the example there it would probably be (0,0,320,5) or something like that 
//and the tableview w ould be at (0,5,320,455)  

As @sam has pointed out, MTStatusBarOverlay is a good choice and I'm currently using it in my apps. However I just found something that exactly fits what the original poster (and I) have been looking for. I love all the folks on GitHub who see some cool UI element in a new app and recreate it for the masses ... this is one of those cases. Awesomeness! Tweetbot-Like Alert Panels (Blog), and the repository is MKInfoPanelDemo at Github.