I was recently building an iPhone app that required a UIButton be held down and then released after a certain period of time had elapsed. The problem I encountered was that testing for touchesBegan didn't work for buttons. I'm not talking about UIControlEvents. I didn't need to know that button had been tapped or it's current state. I needed to know when the button was being pressed and when it was released. The solution was to simply create a UIButton subclass and pass it's touches up the responder chain. MyButton.h - [code lang="cpp"] @interface MyButton : UIButton { } - (void) touchesBegan:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event; @end [/code] MyButton.m - [code lang="cpp"] #import "BrakeButton.h" @implementation BrakeButton - (void) touchesBegan:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event { [self.nextResponder touchesBegan:touches withEvent:event]; // This is where the touch is passed on } - (void) touchesEnded:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event { [self.nextResponder touchesEnded:touches withEvent:event]; // This is where the touch is passed on } @end [/code] Then in your view controller be sure to import your new class: [code lang="cpp"] #import "MyButton.h" [/code] Then you simply implement the touchesBegan and touchesEnded methods. [code lang="cpp"] -(void)touchesBegan:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event { NSLog(@"Button Touches began"); } -(void)touchesEnded:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event { NSLog(@"Button Touches ended"); } [/code] So what is happening here? The main point to understand is that UIButtons are in actuality just UIViews. So they inherit from UIViews giving them the ability to access UIView-like functionality. (touchesBegan, touchesEnded, etc...) I've seen many folks banging their heads against the wall trying to figure out how to capture / intercept button touches so I apparently it's a pretty common problem. Let me know if you find this helpful.