10. Working with Text

You might dismiss the utility of text on a family of touch-based devices. After all, there’s so much information that a user can convey using simple gestures. But text plays an important role. Users have many reasons they need to enter and read characters onscreen. Text allows users to sign into accounts, view and reply to e-mail, specify URLs and read the web pages they refer to, and more. Apple’s brilliant predictive keyboard transforms text entry into a simple and fairly reliable process; its classes and frameworks offer powerful ways to present and manipulate text from your applications. This chapter introduces text recipes that support a wide range of solutions. You’ll read about controlling keyboards, making onscreen elements “text a....