I had a little trouble with my first use of a UIPageControl. I added it to my view in a XIB file and set the “Tint Color” and “Current Page” properties to dark colors. Everything looked great in the XIB but when I ran the app, the pager wasn’t there.

A couple of Google searches led to a few posts mentioning the fact that the pager looks like it’s invisible when shown on a light background. This is a consequence of the default colors being variations of white. I dismissed this as being my issue since I had set the colors to be dark in the XIB and everything looked fine there.

After much messing around with positioning, colors, etc. (everything I could think of) I went back to Apple’s documentation. The currentPageIndicatorTintColor and pageIndicatorTintColor properties are only available in iOS 6.0 and above. Since I was developing with the iOS 6 SDK, the properties were settable in the XIB. But I was running the app on an iOS 5.1 device which didn’t have the properties, so the pager was in fact white. I solved the problem by setting the pager colors back to the default in the XIB and displaying the pager on a dark background.

Two lessons here: 1) When something doesn’t seem to be working, it never hurts to give the documentation another look, and 2) It’s important to test your app on whatever iOS/device versions you’ll actually be deploying to. While this particular issue doesn’t result in a runtime crash, having the pager be invisible to anyone running iOS 5 would not have been a good outcome.