Is there an way to make an invisible UIButton that will still “be there” and catch touch events for my UIImageView?

Question

I thought to be clever and just put an transparent UIButton over an UIImageView with the exact frame size, so that I can wire it up easily with any event I like, for example

Answer 1

Custom UIButtons respond to user interactions unless their alpha is set to 0. Put a custom UIButton on top of your imageView and connect to buttonPressed action. I have also set an additional highlighted image for my UIView, now it really behaves like a UIButton. First I have defined a duration for the UIView for staying highlighted:

#define HIGHLIGHTED_DURATION 0.1 

Then set the image view highlighted if the button is pressed and start a timer to keep it highlighted for that duration. Do not forget to set the highlighted image for your imageview.

- (IBAction)buttonPressed:(id)sender {

[_yourImageView setHighlighted:YES];
_timer = [NSTimer scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval:HIGHLIGHTED_DURATION
                                          target:self
                                        selector:@selector(removeHighlighted)
                                        userInfo:nil
                                         repeats:NO];
}

And simply undo highlighting when the timer finishes:

-(void) removeHighlighted{
    _yourImageView.highlighted = NO;

}