Light gray background in "bounce area" of a UITableView

Apple's iPhone apps such as Music and Contants use a search bar in a UITableView. When you scroll down so that the search bar moves down, the empty space above the scroll view's contents has a light gray background color (see screenshot).

(Notice that the search bar has a slightly darker edge line at its top. This is not there for the default UISearchBar, but subclassing should take care of that.)

I tried setting the background color of the UITableView, but that affects the rows as well. Does anyone know how to achieve this effect? Am I going to have to override implement drawRect: or is there a built in way?

Setting transparencies is bad for performance. What you want is the gray area above the search bar, but it should still be white beyond the end of the list.

You can add a subview to your UITableView that lives above the content instead.

CGRect frame = self.list.bounds;
frame.origin.y = -frame.size.height;
UIView* grayView = [[UIView alloc] initWithFrame:frame];
grayView.backgroundColor = [UIColor grayColor];
[self.listView addSubview:grayView];
[grayView release];

You could add more fancy stuff to the view if you like, perhaps a fade, or a divider line without subclassing UISearchBar.

This is one of my very favorite tricks.

UIView *topview = [[[UIView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0,-480,320,480)] autorelease];
topview.backgroundColor = [UIColor colorWithRed:226.0/255.0 green:231.0/255.0 blue:238.0/255.0 alpha:1];

[self.tableView addSubview:topview];

Basically you're creating a big view the size of the screen and placing it "above" the content area. You'll never be able to scroll up past it.

And don't worry about the memory impact of a UIView that's 320x480 pixels, it won't consume any significant memory because the CALayer doesn't have any meaningful content.

NOTE: Why is this answer relevant when the "accepted" answer is so much simpler? Why not just set the backgroundView on the table view? It's because, in the case of the Contacts app as shown in the original question, the area "above" the table view has a different background color (light blue) than the area "below" the table view (white). This technique allows you to have two different colors above and below the table view, which cannot be accomplished by a simple background.

EDIT 1/2018: As Tom in the comments pointed out, this answer is quite old and assumes that all iOS devices have the same screen size (seems crazy but it was the case in 2009 when I answered this). The concept I present here still works, but you should use UIScreen.main.bounds to figure out the actual screen size, or you could get into some fancy auto layout stuff (suggestions welcome). I don't recommend using tableView.bounds as in another answer, because typically in viewDidLoad the size of your views is not necessarily the size that they will become after the controller resizes them. Sometimes they start out as 0x0!

To extend on HusseinB's suggestion:

Swift 3

let bgView = UIView()
bgView.backgroundColor = UIColor.white
self.tableView.backgroundView = bgView

Objective C

UIView *bgView = [UIView new];
bgView.backgroundColor = [UIColor whiteColor];
[self.tableView setBackgroundView:bgView];