The Life of a Dev

Really easy solution, that a lot of people tend to miss:

UILabel *randomLabel = [[UILabel alloc] init];
randomLabel.numberOfLines = 0;

Setting the numberOfLines property of UILabel will cause text to wrap automatically.
If you want it to wrap to a certain amount of lines… Say wrap to 3 lines then concat then it’s

randomLabel.numberOfLines = 3;

Honestly, this was much easier than I had expected.
A simple 3 lines of code.

QuartzCore must be imported to use the layer property, so load that up:

#import <QuartzCore/QuartzCore.h>

And now, to add a border:

UIView *randomView = [[UIView alloc] init];
randomView.layer.borderColor = [[UIColor colorWithRed:0.8f green:0.8f blue:0.8f alpha:1.0f] CGColor];
randomView.layer.borderWidth = 1.0f;

A common mistake is forgetting to use the CGColor property of the UIColor you select, so keep an eye out.
That code will give your view a 1px light grey border.

This is for those of you that may not want to create a subclass for the sole reason of catching taps on a UIView.

I stumbled across this issue in building my own, custom UITableView that’s a lot more customisable than the default.
Detecting taps through touchesBegan and touchesEnded also can get a bit messy, so I’ve found the best solution to this issue is UIGestureRecognisers.
There are several types for different types of gestures, but this post is about taps.

So to create a UIGestureRecognizer, you need a target and a method for it too call when it gets a tap.
the numberOfTapsRequired property defaults to 1, but I put it in there just for clarity. Change it to 2 if you want it to register double taps.

UITapGestureRecognizer *gestureRecogniser = [[UITapGestureRecognizer alloc] initWithTarget:self action:@selector(handleTap:)];
gestureRecogniser.numberOfTapsRequired = 1;
[self addGestureRecognizer:gestureRecogniser];
[gestureRecogniser release];

Implementation of the handleTap method:

- (void)handleTap:(UIGestureRecognizer*)tap {
    NSLog(@"I've been tapped!.");
}

I was making an app recently and in order to line up perfectly with designs, I needed the placeholder text in my UITextFields to be a certain colour, size & font.
After quite a bit of googling I couldn’t find my answer, so I made my own. Subclassing seemed a bit overkill, so I decided to create a category to override the drawPlaceholderInRect method. See the code below:

UITextField+Placeholder.h

#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>
@interface UITextField (Placeholder)
- (void) drawPlaceholderInRect:(CGRect)rect;
@end

UITextField+Placeholder.m

#import <UITextField+Placeholder.h>
@implementation UITextField (Placeholder)
- (void) drawPlaceholderInRect:(CGRect)rect {
    [[UIColor colorWithRed:142.0f/255.0f green:205.0f/255.0f blue:236.0f/255.0f alpha:1.0f] setFill];
    [[self placeholder] drawInRect:rect withFont:[self font]];
}
@end

Then, in the files you wish to create UITextFields that have the custom Placeholders, simply import the header for your new category.

If you need to have several different UITextFields each with different placeholder colours then you’ll need to subclass.
The @interface and @implementation contents would be identical to if you used a Category.

In the latest iPhone app I created, I stumbled across a need to create a custom UINavigationBar from an Image.

Before iOS 5, there was no documentation on how to do this exactly, but it’s actually very easy.

Make sure your image is the correct size, and simply use this:

if([navController.navigationBar respondsToSelector:@selector(setBackgroundImage:forBarMetrics:)] ) {
    //iOS 5 new UINavigationBar custom background
    [navController.navigationBar setBackgroundImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"nav-bar-bg-image.png"] forBarMetrics: UIBarMetricsDefault];
} else {
    [navController.navigationBar insertSubview:[[[UIImageView alloc] initWithImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"nav-bar-bg-image.png"]] autorelease] atIndex:0];
}