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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-13T13:50:23+00:00

Our iOS6 app is data-entry-heavy and has small fonts, and we want to make

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Our iOS6 app is data-entry-heavy and has small fonts, and we want to make it easier for users to find the currently focused field among many fields on the screen.

First, I notice that iOS by default doesn’t do anything to draw the user’s eye to a focused text field, unlike many other platforms and apps. Is this because it’s an explicit design guideline or implicit app-store requirement that text fields should not display a focus highlight? I don’t want to get our app ejected from the app store for this minor thing. 😉

Assuming focus highlighting is allowed, is there an easy way to show a “glow” inside or outside the text box when it gets focus, like I can do with CSS on a web app using box-shadow, as in this jsFiddle.

Finally, do you know good examples of iOS apps that have done what we’re trying to do?

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  1. Editorial Team

    I don’t think it’s prohibited to do that. Although I think Apple would recommend if it’s necessary to mark the selected textfield, you should consider splitting your view into multiple screens. A single screen shouldn’t get too cluttered.

    However if in your case that’s not possible or not wanted, the easiest way to achieve a ‘glow-effect’ would be this (modify the values as you see fit):

    #import <QuartzCore/QuartzCore.h>

textField.layer.masksToBounds = NO;
textField.layer.shadowColor = [[UIColor blueColor] CGColor];
textField.layer.shadowOffset = CGSizeZero;
textField.layer.shadowRadius = 10.0f;
textField.layer.shadowOpacity = 1.0;

    (Don’t forget to add the Quarz Framework to your project)

    It would look like this:
    enter image description here

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