viewWillAppear, viewDidAppear not being called, not firing

(This is both question and answer since it took quite a bit of digging to find the real answer.)

Hiding UITabBar when pushing a UIView

I have a UITabBarController where the default view controller is a UINavigationController . I want to be able to hide the UITabBar of the UITabBarController when I push a certain view in the UINavigationController .

Video compression changes custom tab bar in iOS 5

I have implemented a custom tabbar in my app. Where I can scroll on the tab, and also the tab can have more than 5 buttons. The problem is when i pick a video with imagepickercontroller, the compressing video dialog box shows up. The video is compressed and when the imagepicker is dismissed, my custom tabBar gets distorted. The default tabbar shows at the bottom of the screen along with my custom tabbar. And this problem is only when i run the app on iOS 5 device. Please help me out here, either tell me how to avoid compression (tried setting the video quality to 'HIGH'), or some way around the compression thing.

Why is the tabBar still black even after I set opaque to NO, alpha to 0, and color to clear?

As above, I can't seem to change the background color or image of the tabBar. Even when hiding it by changing alphan 0, I still see it as a black solid bar.