Show HN: An imitation of the iOS8 system keyboard, built in Swift

8 points

12 years ago

Hey guys! I built a custom keyboard for iOS8 that imitates the looks and behavior of the native QWERTY keyboard. The goal from the start was to be entirely programmatic: all the art and layout are generated in code, so it's much easier to extend than something built using XIBs and PNGs. It's rough around the edges (due to deadlines), the code is messy, and I don't intend to devote too much of my side project time to maintaining it as a framework, but I figured it might make a good starting point for anyone doing something similar.

The project page: https://github.com/archagon/tasty-imitation-keyboard

Here's how it got started. I speak Russian, but I'm terrible at typing on anything but the standard QWERTY keyboard, and so I was interested in getting transliteration (along the lines of http://www.translit.ru) working on iOS8. On a Mac, this was as easy as building an "input method", which sits between your input and output and converts things as you type. But on iOS8, if you're building a custom keyboard, you really have to start from scratch. My goal was to make a keyboard that looks pretty much the same as the system keyboard but allows you to change the way it behaves, thus fulfilling the same goal as an input method in a roundabout way.

The behavior isn't perfect. The graphics deviate, there are a few rough performance edges, and there are some features missing (including iPad support). But it works! I made my translit keyboard[1] and got it into the App Store.

[1]: http://translit-keyboard.archagon.net

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