iPhone app UI element

http://culturedcode.com/things/

do you guys know what UI element they used for their the top me开发者_JAVA百科nu (home, car, phone...), the "A magical tag bar"? or is it a custom made UI? If so how do I make one that look like that?

The regular old UIToolbar looks rather like that actually, but larger. Actually thats a good thing, finger fatness being accounted for. As for buttons which have that 'pressed' look/are modal, I don't think I've seen one on the app store yet, but they should be fairly easy to make by subclassing UIButton, overriding the drawing method, rendering the background, or not, as a three part image, depending on its modal state, then just calling the standard UIButton drawing implementation.

You linked to the Mac version of the Things, which does indeed have such a UI element. But the iPhone version, which you seem to be interested in, does not have any such control. That specific control isn't included in the iPhone SDK. The closest equivalent is UISegmentedControl.