Question

I am having a terrible time trying to get an input box like the one in the SMS app.

Can anyone offer some guidance on how to build one of these and make it look good? I need an input box that is shaped nicely like the UITextfield but will stretch vertically when typing.

I assume that I need to calculate width of the text and stretch the overlay image frame vertically when the text word wraps. The closest I have come does stretch but the cursor bounces all around when nearing the boundaries.

UPDATE:

I have worked on this everyday for a week and I have about given up on the UITextView. I can get it to stretch properly but when backspacing, the Textview height shrinks too much when going up a line. As I continue backspacing it corrects itself. For example, it displays this behavior when I am on line 4 and backspace up to line 3. Then as I continue backspacing, it corrects until I get to the end of line 2. Then it corrects itself,…. etc.

I decided to try to subclass UITextField but I can’t even get it to display in the Frame size that I specify. 150,150,150,150.

Answer 1

Three20 project has a control that should do this for you.

From the Three20 README:

TTTextEditor is a UITextView which can
grow in height automatically as you
type. I use this for entering messages
in Facebook Chat, and it behaves
similarly to the editor in Apple’s SMS
app.