Loading images in +load

In my current app I have some UIButton subclasses which set up their own appearance, so that I can put these UIButton subclasses in a storyboard and have styled buttons.

To do this I was putting my code in the +load method so that it would get loaded without me needing to call it from anywhere else, as shown below.

@implementation DBSGreyButton

+ (void)load {
    UIImage *buttonImage = [UIImage imageNamed:@"DBSGreyButton"];
    UIEdgeInsets edgeInsets = UIEdgeInsetsMake(0.0f, 13.0f, 0.0f, 13.0f);
    buttonImage = [buttonImage resizableImageWithCapInsets:edgeInsets];
    id appearance = [self appearance];
    [appearance setBackgroundImage:buttonImage
                          forState:UIControlStateNormal];
    [appearance setTitleColor:[UIColor darkTextColor]
                     forState:UIControlStateNormal];
}

@end

Unfortunately, I discovered that the images that get loaded have the scale of 1. My solution is to have a +loadAppearance method that gets called from the AppDelegate.

Thanks to Chris Parker for confirming that “+load fires before UIApplication init so scale isn’t set up yet…

Edit: Thanks to Vadim Shpakovski for pointing out that +initialize does work for this, saying it’s “One more reason to not use + (void)load and prefer + (void)initialize to reduce launch time in some cases.