Custom iPhone Keyboard

Question

I need (i.e. a customer requirement) to provide a custom keyboard for the user to type text into both text fields and areas. I already have something that does the keyboard

Answer 1

As long as you're not submitting your app to the app store, you can use a technique called method swizzling to dynamically replace methods of core classes at runtime. For example:

@interface UIControl(CustomKeyboard)
- (BOOL)__my__becomeFirstResponder
@end

@implementation UIControl(CustomKeyboard)
- (BOOL)__my__becomeFirstResponder
{
    BOOL becameFirstResponder = [self __my__becomeFirstResponder];
    if ([self canBecomeFirstResponder]) {
        [MyKeyboard orderFront];
    }
    return becameFirstResponder;
}

+ (void)initialize
{
    Method old = class_getInstanceMethod(self, @selector(becomeFirstResponder));
    Method new = class_getInstanceMethod(self, @selector(__my__becomeFirstResponder));
    method_exchangeImplementations(old, new);
}
@end

Please don't use anything like this in any production code. Also, I haven't actually tested this, so YMMV.