Soulver ios how to#
Soulver ios update#

Soulver ios update#

Developing in Objective Code means you won't have to update your code because of changes to Objective C itself, with Swift it's pretty much guaranteed they'll make significant syntax changes every major release (the last one in September did).ĭeveloping a keyboard extension means sometimes your extension won't load for mysterious reasons, and you'll need to waste hours debugging why. In Objective C the debugger is almost always correct, in the current version of Swift often you can't see array or dictionary contents, sometimes what it shows is inaccurate, and when stepping through code often takes nonsensical routes. First, Objective C doesn't cause Xcode's code parser to crash many times a day, while developing in Swift does, sometimes crashing Xcode itself. Getting back to why you don't want to use Swift in an extension. If you need to access the internet or data within your app for any reason (tracking usage information, activating an in-app purchase, accessing preferences) you must also convince your user to turn on 'Full Access', which presents an incredibly scary alert that reads to users as if turning it on means you will be able to spy on them and steal their passwords To activate a keyboard extension requires getting the user to turn it on in their iPhone settings, there is no way around that and no way to pick which keyboard they choose within your app (other than to not allow custom keyboard extensions at all). The standard custom input view API in cocoa is very powerful, the one in the keyboard extension is almost entirely neutered, so you can do far more with a custom input view than you can with a keyboard Extension. How do I retrieve keystrokes from a custom keyboard on an iOS app?

Soulver ios how to#

There is a good deal of existing documentation on how to do so, including this excellent post on stack overflow. This is good news because writing a custom input keyboard class within your own app is very simple and easy, and a great place to start. If I could do my current project over, I would have done it in Objective C just to vastly simplify what I was learning.īut the good news is that you don't need the keyboard to run in other apps. Both Swift and the Keyboard Extension API are brand new, not well documented, creating significant learning curves, and both have significant bugs or weird implementation details to work around.įrom the way you phrased your question it doesn't sound like you are very experienced in iOS development, and attempting to learn too many things at once is a recipe for disaster. I am writing a keyboard extension in Swift right now and highly recommend not doing the same. The keyboard/custom view needs to be available to the app that contains it without activation in iOS settings.Ĭan this be done as an extension given the requirements, or can the custom keyboard extension be easily converted to a custom input view? Can you illustrate either one or point out sample Swift code I missed when searching? Thank you. I do need to be able to programmatically select the keyboard extension within the app. I finally just about have digested constraints in the editor and would like to make use of a storyboard or xib. It looks to me like custom keyboards are the right place to start for for a custom input view keyboard. Ultimately I do not need a custom keyboard extension to offer to other apps but I do not mind if my app offers one.

What I want is an enhanced number pad which I would modify, like in the Soulver app in the iOS app store. The existing Xcode 6.1 default set of keyboards do not fit my app needs. I want to design my own custom input view keyboard using a custom keyboard extension in swift.