Is there a nine-patch loader for iPhone?

Question

Android has a nice way of defining stretchable images called a nine-patch. See these docs for a description of the concept. The idea is to surround a png image with a 1-pi

Answer 1

All UIImage images support this natively. By default the entire images is stretchable, but you can set caps with the leftCapWidth and topCapHeight properties or you can generate one from an existing UIImage with the - (UIImage *)stretchableImageWithLeftCapWidth:(NSInteger)leftCapWidth topCapHeight:(NSInteger)topCapHeight method.

Do note that in apple's implementation, when you set one or both of these values, the stretchable area is forced to be a single pixel high/wide.