UIKeyboard not automatically translucent in iOS7

Question

I understand that when developing in Xcode 5 with and iOS 7 project, the keyboard that pops up when interacting with a UITextField should be translucent and show through any colors in the background. This is not the case in both my projects. I have a colored & blurred background and I'm hoping for that to transpire through the keyboard; however the keyboard remains the default white/gray.

This is what I have so far as a demo:

UIColor *tintColor = [UIColor colorWithWhite:0.21 alpha:0.4];
UIColor *background = [[UIColor alloc] initWithPatternImage:[[UIImage imageNamed:@"universe.jpg"] applyBlurWithRadius:19
                                                                                                            tintColor:tintColor
                                                                                                saturationDeltaFactor:1.8
                                                                                                            maskImage:nil]];
self.view.backgroundColor = background;

UITextField *text = [[UITextField alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(200, 200, 300, 60)];
[self.view addSubview:text];

I have even tried to set the keyboard appearance type to both UIKeyboardAppearanceDefault and UIKeyboardAppearanceLight

Can someone please guide/tell me on how can I achieve the keyboard translucent effect? Should this be automatic? Thanks

EDIT 1:

I have the iPad mini, I have the iPad 3rd generation and the iPad 4th generation both with retina displays. Running iOS 7.0.2

Answer 1

I built a simple app to test to try to find this issue, but I've been unable to replicate it except by setting IPHONEOS_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET to a lower version number like 6.0, then running on iOS 6.0. In all cases, on all iOS 7 devices and simulator, the default keyboard has a translucent blur of the content underneath it.

Perhaps you could share a picture, or a sample project?

Answer 2

Your code, setup and example worked fine on my xCode. I tried first only setting the background color to something obvious like red.

self.view.backgroundColor = [UIColor redColor];

This showed through the keyboard. Afterwards I tried an image without a blur effect.

UIImageView* img = [[UIImageView alloc] initWithImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"images.jpeg"]];
img.frame = self.view.frame;
[self.view addSubview:img];

This to showed through, but not as much as the red because the image I used was one similar to a galaxy as you stated, and therefore had a lot of black in it.

Lastly I tried your exact code, using the gaussian blur effect to create a color.

UIColor *tintColor = [UIColor colorWithWhite:0.21 alpha:0.4];
UIColor *background = [[UIColor alloc] initWithPatternImage:[[UIImage imageNamed:@"images.jpeg"] applyBlurWithRadius:19 tintColor:tintColor saturationDeltaFactor:1.8 maskImage:nil]];
self.view.backgroundColor = background;

This to also worked, but it was extreamly hard to notice. The combined affect of dark colors being blurred once by the gaussian and being blurred again by the keyboard made it almost unnoticeable. I suggest you try a similar approach to see if you are actually getting a transparent keyboard, because if the code and info you have given are correct, then it seems like you are and maybe can not see it.

Also the keyboard is only slightly transparent, so if you are expecting a full transparency then that is not the case. This slight transparency gets minimized the more uniform the background color is for instance if you had an all black or white background it would be unnoticeable.

Edit: I confirmed that this is not the case on the iPad running iOS7.0.x I get the standard all grey keyboard, even using standard apps like Safari. It seems that Apple had not optimized the transparency for such large screens and it was causing lag issues. It also seems that this is partially fixed in iOS7.1 and there are more transparent iPad features in iOS7.1, but people are recommending turning them off as they cause the iPad to run slower than normal.

Answer 3

iOS 7.0.3 reduced much of the translucency in navigation bars, toolbars, and the keyboard.

For navigation bars and toolbars, starting in iOS 7.0.3, you can adjust the alpha property of the UIColor set as barTintColor if you want it more translucent.

As far as public APIs go, keyboards in iOS 7, however, still have only these options:

textField.keyboardAppearance = UIKeyboardAppearanceDefault;  // the default (same as light)
textField.keyboardAppearance = UIKeyboardAppearanceDark;  // dark look (previously UIKeyboardAppearanceAlert)
textField.keyboardAppearance = UIKeyboardAppearanceLight;  // light look

So I assume you're not getting the translucency you'd like because you're using iOS 7.0.3 or later. You can verify this by downloading an older version of Xcode and running your app in that version's simulator.

As far as private APIs, the keyboard background is made up of UIKBBackdropView and UIKBBackgroundView. You can take a look at their extracted header files here, but you should not modify these if you're submitting to the App Store. (These modifications are grounds for rejection, and also aren't documented so they could be changed in any iOS update.)