Doing this expands the keyboard’s sandbox, as described in Establishing and Maintaining User Trust. To enable these things, set the value of the RequestsOpenAccess Boolean key in the ist file to YES. Sandboxīy default, a keyboard has no network access and cannot share files with its containing app. Your custom keyboard does not have access to the view hierarchy of the input, it cannot control the cursor and select text.Īlso the custom keyboard cannot display anything above the top row (like the system keyboard when you long press a key on the tow row). passwords), phone pad objects (like the phone number fields in Contacts). There are certain text input objects that your custom keyboard is not eligible to type into: secure fields (aka. Note: If you only need to add a few buttons to the System Keyboard you should look into Custom Views for Data Input. Trust. Your custom keyboard gives you access to what a user types, so trust between you and your user is essential.Ī “next keyboard” key. The affordance that lets a user switch to another keyboard is part of a keyboard’s user interface you must provide one in your keyboard. There are two development essentials for every custom keyboard: For this reason the keyboard mustallow the user to switch to another keyboard. The essential function of a custom keyboard is simple: Respond to taps, gestures, or other input events and provide text, in the form of an unattributed NSString object, at the text insertion point of the current text input object.Īfter a user chooses a keyboard it remains as the default one whenever a users opens an app.

full code OverviewĪ custom keyboard replaces the system keyboard for users who want capabilities such as a novel text input method or the ability to enter text in a language not otherwise supported in iOS. It should take you about 20 minutes to go through all the steps.

I will go over the basics of a Keyboard Extension and then make a morse code keyboard using the new Application Extension API in iOS 8.

Custom keyboard swift github