Accounting for the lost Status Bar

Because a game is typically full screen, in order to provide an immersive experience in our game, we'll lose the important 20 pixel Status Bar located on the top of our iPhone or iPad screen.

The Status Bar contains important user information on connectivity signal, the time, and battery life; we may not want to completely remove this functionality if we can avoid it. Users often enjoy such features and may want to know how much battery life they have or what time it is when playing our game. However, we don't want them to close our app in order to find this information.

In this recipe, we'll discuss ways in which we can best go about keeping these features inside of our application, so the user is never forced to leave midway through a game level.

Getting ready

Either the iPhone or iPad will work well in this recipe, as both will give an idea as to the significance of losing the status bar.

It also may be useful to read up on the iOS Date and Time...