How to Create Custom Keyboards in iOS

for our underutilized ios feature of the week award, how about uitextfield/uitextview’s inputview field ? probably pretty much totally overlooked it, haven’t you? here’s a sample implementation for next time something like that strikes your fancy (h/t: ios dev weekly ):

venmo / vencalculatorinputview : calculator keyboard used in the venmo ios app :

if you don’t have custom input needs but just want to improve the regular keyboard experience, there’s news for you too: fleksy has released an ios sdk that lets users long press to switch keyboards, if they’ve installed the free fleksy app :

and here’s another project to improve the default keyboard:

tonqa / justtype – the better keyboard for ios

justtype is a keyboard extension using swipe gestures, highlighting and suggestions. it is built to be used in any ios text editor and all text-intensive ios apps. and it is really easy to use. if you want to have a video demonstration you can find it on this blogpost .

and just as a side caution, if you do get all excited to implement a custom keyboard with transparency and it displays funny in ios 7, check out this stack overflow question !