Swift...
So I've got an existing app and I'm working on its appearance. The current task is customising the decimal pad that pops up when the user hits a textField.
I've looked around on how to make it but it always seems that you have to go into the iPhone/ipad settings and add the custom keyboard.
eg. This StackOverFlow Question
and they all seem to point to this same tutorial..
iOS 8: Creating a Custom Keyboard
My problem is that I don't want the user to have to go into settings.
So the question is....IS THIS POSSIBLE?
The following pic is what I want to use. I have made this in an XIB file through adding a target keyboard which makes the new folder with KeyboardViewController.swift , info.plist and NumPad.xib. Though i think I'm on the wrong track, can someone point me the right way please.
Also anyone know the exact dimensions this view should be.. assuming what I'm asking is in fact possible. Let me know if I'm not being clear enough!
NumPad.xib(pic)
Many many thanks,
Steve
SOLUTION: Thanks to Andrea for correcting my search keywords. It led me to this Stack Question which hopefully sends some others to the correct end of the internet that have mistakes custom keyboard with custom input views!
Sure it is possible without going into settings, but they are called custom input views.
You should look into inputViews here what Apple says about them Custom views for data input.
Basically when the user press a text field instead of loading the usual keyboard it loads an inputView that you specify, pay attention that custom keyboard term is misleading. If you google for tutorial you'll find most probably link like the ones that you found.
For a practical example check this tutorial or this, is a little bit old, but the principle are still the same
Related
Setting showsTouchWhenHighlighted, e.g. via the IB option "Shows Touch On Highlight," on a button without a title will alter the VoiceOver description. After reading the accessibility label, VoiceOver beeps and announces a description of the image. Is there a way to disable this behavior?
Setting the accessibilityContainerType value to UIAccessibilityContainerTypeSemanticGroup works and that's great 👏 but I'm not sure that
this is the goal of this element.
Even if a button my be seen as a container, I understood this instance property dealt with
data-based containers rather. 🤔
I looked into your problem that arouse my curiosity and couldn't find out an appropriate solution with the Apple API unfortunately.
First, I thought that this solution may help but it didn't work as you mentioned in your comment... thanks. 😉
Apparently, when the showsTouchWhenHighlighted property is used, there's an added view inside the button that renders the glow touch ⟹ this is a UIButtonBarPressedIndicator image you can detect thanks to the Debug Hierarchy in Xcode for instance. 👍
This new image seems to put the default value of the accessibility trait property of your button image even if you have already changed it programmatically. 🤯
So, in order to avoid VoiceOver from using the screen recognition and reading out some useless information, I made something very ugly but efficient to reach your goal in the viewDidAppear for instance (see the 'basic operations' sheet of this link):
myButton.subviews.forEach{$0.accessibilityTraits = .none}
Bad hack due to a native problem of implementation or a simple line of code that anyone can understand, this solution removes every possible VoiceOver screen recognition from the button 🥳... and I'm still interested if you can explain a little bit the reason why your solution works, please. 😉
Set accessibilityContainerType = UIAccessibilityContainerTypeSemanticGroup.
I want to create a custom keyboard, and I want to add more characters on it. if user long press a button it show more characters. like IOS default keyboard shows popup button after long press.
I created a very complex keyboard a few months ago where every key needed to have at least 5 different variations (Amharic dialect). I found that many pop ups do not work very well as they don't pop up over the top of the keyboard, I looked at how other keyboards achieved this but couldn't find a way to make it work. You can see a question on this problem here.
As a work around I created my custom keyboard with an extra row on the top, this was normally filled with numbers but on a long press would switch to show the alternative keys available. On long press the key pressed would be added to the field and if they chose on of the alternatives it would then replace the first key.
To give you a better idea here are some images:
Regular Keyboard:
Long press:
NOTE: Excuse the poor quality but I could only find an intermediate version of the project to screen print.
While working on this project I found that pop ups were a lot more difficult to achieve than this. I researched creating my own pop ups with bezier paths and also using pop ups themselves with the CYRKeyboard Button. (Note although the CYR gif shows the exact functionality required I found this gif to be extremely misleading). But in the end I came back to the above solution which worked very smoothly, quickly and easily.
Hope this helps
I was wondering if it is possible to get the stock Apple keyboard design as a file to make a own custom keyboard with only slight changes to the original one.
I would like to only change one Key and was hoping that I don't have to build the whole design myself and try to imitate the original design.
Thanks in advance
I built a custom keyboard with the same look as the system keyboard (except it has only one "letter" key!): https://github.com/acoomans/ACKeyboard
I'm sure you can start from there and adapt it to your need. Good luck!
There is another custom keyboard with all the keys here. Looks like the might be a bit hacked together but could be another good place to start. https://github.com/archagon/tasty-imitation-keyboard
I am looking to implement a custom toolbar that sits above my keyboard for a text field with some custom values. I've found a ton of tutorials online but this question is for asking what's the best way to do this.
This tutorial here http://blog.carbonfive.com/2012/03/12/customizing-the-ios-keyboard/ provides the most common way I can see across many tutorials, with creating a new subclass of UIView and using delegates to get that information across.
That's the commonality. However, I came across this tutorial which in the view controller itself just creates the toolbar, assigns it to the textField inputAccessory and it's good to go. In fact, I tried out the code and without any effort, I have now a custom keyboard.
http://easyplace.wordpress.com/2013/03/29/adding-custom-buttons-to-ios-keyboard/
This just seems a bit too easy to me though and I'd think the proper, Apple recommended way would be to create that UIView subclass and use delegates so that the view controller with the text fields acts as that delegate.
I'm specifically targeting iOS 7 in my app.
What are people's thoughts on this? If the second easier link is supported and is likely to pass Apple's guidelines, it's a good starting point but if delegates are the way to go, I'd rather look into that from the start.
Your thoughts will be appreciated.
There is no 'Apple Approved' way to do this, and its hard to believe anything you do here would get your app rejected. The custom keyboard you reference in your post has the iOS6 look and will appear outdated in an iOS6 app. I'll mention some iOS7 suggestions shortly, but the constant danger of mimicking what the System looks like today is guaranteed to look outdated later. In Mac/Cocoa development, Apple use to say at the WWDC that if you did something custom, make it look custom, don't take a standard Apple widget and try to duplicate it. But that advice is mostly ignored.
For iOS 7, you can create buttons that appear just like the system ones do (not pressed), but of course when someone presses them, they won't act like system buttons (i.e. animate up and "balloon" out.
I'm currently using a fantastic add-on keyboard, my fork of KOKeyboard (which uses the buttons above). This is such a cool addition. While the buttons look like iPad buttons, each one has 5 keys in it. By dragging to a corner you select one of the four, and tapping in the middle gives you that key. This might be overkill for your app, but it really helped me with mine. It looks like this:
(the Key / Value is in the under laying view.) The center control lets you move the cursor - its like a joy stick - and can be used to both move and select text. Amazing class, I wish I'd invented it!
Also, for any solution, you want to use a UIToolbar as the view holding the keys, for the reason that it supports blur of the view it overlays, just like the keyboard does. You can use the UIToolbar with no bar button items in it (if you want), and just add subviews. This is a "trick" I learned here, as there is no other way to get blur!
David's KOKeyboard (er…, the one he used - see David's comment below) looks nice. I suspect that he is using the official Apple mechanism:
inputAccessoryView
Typically, you'd set that value on a UITextView, but it can be any class that allows itself to become the first responder.
The provided view will be placed above the default apple keyboard.
It is correct that there is no official mechanism (and it is suggested against) to modify any system provided keyboard. You can add to it, as above. You can also entirely replace it for with your own mechanism. Apply will forgo the keyboard setting on your view and use a custom input mechanism if you set
inputView
set it to any view - Apple will still manage its appearance and dismissal as it does the custom keyboards.
Edit: Of course, iOS 8.x added significant access to keyboards. (not mentioned here)
We want a native rich text editor because we are trying to stay away from using Javascript and webviews for this solution.
We've tried many things so far, and we're left with quite a few obstacles that we just can't get around. Let me break it down into questions that I hope you can answer.
I have a UIButton, that says "B" on it, and I want to put it into the 'selected' state when a user sets 'Bold' from using the TextView's long-press gesture on a selection. How do I register for this state change? I tried adding an observer on the textView.attributedText, but it doesn't seem they are changing that dictionary, but instead are updating it. NSDictionary has no way, as far as I know, to add observers on the dictionary's keys. So I'm stuck with noticing this change.
Regarding number 1, I also tried setting the textView's inputDelegate and it seems that the method - (void)textDidChange:(id )textInput never gets called. :( Docs says is should. What did I do wrong?
How do I update the attributedText weight when I hit my bold italic or underline button.
How do I convert my attributed text into HTML?
I saw a few neat libraries for number 4, but I'm still curious what you'd come up with. (Broadens my options). But, I can't really work on number 4 until I figure out how to do the previous 3.
This editor will also need hyperlinks, bulleted lists, and numbered lists, more things I imagine I'll struggle through, but if you could answer the 4 questions above, that will keep me held over for a while. :)
Thanks!
Here is a link to an iOS rich text editor I've been working on.
https://github.com/aryaxt/iOS-Rich-Text-Editor
There is still a lot of work that has to be done, but the basic features are there.
The Apple sample application called 'TextEdit' does much of what you've described and, if not that, would be a very good starting point. Find the sample code with a search in the Organizer.
There is a commercial editor based on the DTCoreText library. I've used that library but not the rich text editor. Look at the Cocoanetics web site. It's not cheap but will save you a ton of work.