Getting around the limitations of iPhone's UITextField

Question

I have spent a few days trying to get around the limitations with UITextField, namely no text wrap and number of lines. I have created a UILabel, which is used to display the text entered in UITextField and does all the formating stuff properly. The UITextField is hidden and the user sees all the texted entered only in UILabel as it's being entered.

Everything is working perfectly except for the lack of a cursor on the UILabel to show the user where the next character typed into the field will show up.

I have experimented with using various characters as cursors on the label. But there is no getting around the fact that it is not the standard blinking cursor indicator on the iPhone and so the whole thing just looks wrong.

Before I abandon ship and go for a UITextView (with its own set of issues) I was wondering if anyone has any ideas as to how a bilinking cursor can be added to the text field on a label text.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Your approach has other issues which make it worth rethinking the strategy.

• How does selection look like?
• copy + paste?
• Do you handle right to left languages?
• Auto correction?

The list is certainly longer, but I think it's enough to consider other solutions. But I agree that all of UIKit's text handling is a bit poor.

Answer 2

If you don't need to support selection, copy and paste, and only need multiline input, you could use a | character and animate it as if it were blinking... either that or perhaps a custom overlay view on top of the label, that would implement the cursor drawing, animation and positioning based on the length of the string and the font used.

– sizeWithFont:forWidth:lineBreakMode:  
– sizeWithFont:constrainedToSize:  
– sizeWithFont:constrainedToSize:lineBreakMode:  
– sizeWithFont:minFontSize:actualFontSize:forWidth:lineBreakMode:

may help to achieve just that.

Answer 3

So what are the issues preventing you from going to a UITextView? It seems possibly easier to address those.