On the tech talk 2011 I saw a speech about the new UIAppearance protocol. There is not a lot of documentation out there yet. I will shortly summarize what I re
UIAppearance is documented within the headers of each class. Look within there for methods marked UI_APPEARANCE_SELECTOR at the very end. Those are the methods you can call through the appearance proxy. I'm not aware of a list outside of the headers.
The appearance customization is called immediately after passing through the proxy, as well as whenever a new object is constructed. But this will only work for methods marked with that UI_APPEARANCE_SELECTOR