Announcing Rich Text Editing for Everybody

Today we’re announcing the accelerated availability program for DTRichTextEditorView a view that combines the richness of NSAttributedString+HTML with UITextInput to give you the editing capabilities you need to change text editing on iOS forever.

The component has reached a status where it actually makes sense to have people start implementing it in prototypes and BETAs of their apps to gather the necessary feedback for polishing the API and find out features that are missing to allow for your special use cases to work with that as well. That final stage should be concluding before the end of August 2011.

Find out what features are already implemented, which ones are still missing and how you can get your hands on it today.

These are the currently implemented features and what is still not in there:

• set the contents of the editor view either from an NSAttributedString or HTML
• move cursor by long pressing, circular loupe
• move selection handles by long pressing or dragging them, rectangular loupe
• change selection with hardware keyboard, cursor keys and change selection holding Shift
• enter text via on-screen or hardware keyboard
• support for entering text that requires marking, e.g. japanese characters
• support for adding images either inline or in their own paragraph
• Auto-Completion implemented (where it suggests a word while you are typing)
• Auto-Correction – NOT YET  (where a suspected misspelled word has a red dotted underline)
• Toggling of bold, italic and underlined
• Your own custom views over links, videos or images
• Scrolling capability, the editor is a UIScrollView subclass that does not override the delegate
• Pasteboard, cut/copy/paste plain text, post NSURL or UIImage. NOT YET: copy rich text to and from the component, because there is no native format
• Context menu. TO ADD: support for your own menu items to show up after selecting text

Here is a video demo that I made some time ago. The component has progressed quite a bit since then, but this shows you the basic features.

I wouldn’t try to use this for very long documents yet because there some work still remains to do partial lay outing of an attributed string and merging the results into an existing display. But for most regular use cases it should work well.

For your purchase price of 500 Euros you get unlimited access to the SVN repo where the component is being developed and you can start implementing it right away. I will be working with you to iron out any problems that might be remaining. There is already one pilot app that’s being developed with this pre-release version, but it is now necessary to include more developers for the stated reasons as well as financing the continued development.

To order, send me an e-mail with your invoice address. As usual I will be sending you a PDF invoice and after payment (PayPal or bank transfer) you will immediately get access to the component and demo app. Note that EU companies need to provide a VAT ID. Private persons have to be charged 20% VAT on top of the purchase price.

Categories: Parts