iPhone UILabel text soft shadow

Question

I know soft shadows are not supported by the UILabel out of the box, on the iPhone. So what would be the best way to implement my own one?

EDIT:

Answer 1

To keep things up to date: Creating the shadow in Swift is as easy as that:

Import the QuartzCore Framework

import QuartzCore

And set the shadow attributes to your label

titleLabel.shadowColor = UIColor.blackColor()
titleLabel.shadowOffset = CGSizeMake(0.0, 0.0)
titleLabel.layer.shadowRadius = 5.0
titleLabel.layer.shadowOpacity = 0.8
titleLabel.layer.masksToBounds = false
titleLabel.layer.shouldRasterize = true

Answer 2

Additionally to IIDan's answer: For some purposes it is necessary to set

label.layer.shouldRasterize = YES

I think this is due to the blend mode that is used to render the shadow. For example I had a dark background and white text on it and wanted to "highlight" the text using a black shadowy glow. It wasn't working until I set this property.

Answer 3

Subclass UILabel, and override -drawInRect: