Social Text Storage

A.k.a how to customize NSTextStorage to fit your needs. See the accompanying video on Nodes channel on YouTube.

https://youtu.be/HSmbh9tM15A

Transcript

1. Social Text Storage Icon was stolen from the internet without any consent of the original author and I have no idea what the license for it is.
2. Text Kit model controller view
3. NSTextStorage (aka NSAttributedString) Informs about changes in string! Can be subclassed and changed to implement custom behaviour, by overriding just 4 methods. Can be used by UILabel & UITextView (with hacks!)
4. NSLayoutManager The actual controller Takes all the info from text storage, text container (*) and does typesetting by consulting CoreText. When layout is finished, tells the view to draw (*) NSTextContainer is basically a frame with super powers
5. Social Text Storage Custom subclass to be used in social network apps Highlights usernames(*), mentions, hashtags and URLs Quite lightweight, plug & play solution (at least for vanilla UITextView) (*) usernames have to be set manually as in an array of string
6. How it works? Use of regex to process text Username regexes generated when usernames assigned Dependent on settings (OptionSetType), highlights elements Stores elements in an array with range and type
7. Demo
8. Social Label Implements basic functionality of social text storage Adds user interactivity with highlighted elements Uses gesture recognizer and layout manager to figure out what you’ve pressed
9. Demo
10. Social Text View Convenience subclass Makes setting up SocialTextStorage easier and overrides some properties to pass along the values
11. Demo
12. Caveats UILabel requires subclassing to work with NSTextStorage Subclass of UITextView with custom NSTextStorage does NOT support loading from XIB/Storyboard Emoji’s require font size hack to display properly if text font size is small
13. What’s missing? Documentation Small refactoring to make it even more generic Highlighted element color on touch on Social Label Tests?
14. Plans Merge into NOCore Maybe write an article Shameless boast on Hipchat
15. Resources objc.io - Issue 5, Getting to Know TextKit stackoverflow - all questions tagged with ‘TextKit’ iOS Developer Library - you know, “documentation” Ray Wenderlich - tutorials (lol, like we need them)
16. Thanks!