A few months ago I mentioned a custom iOS UI control that allows you to add a row of convenience keys for easier text entry on the iPad.

Here’s a new control from Denis Lebedev called DLIDEKeyboard that builds upon this idea.

What this control provides is custom keys on both the iPhone and iPad and an easy way to add and customize these keys.  You can use simple key values or have buttons perform completely custom actions with custom images (the included example project demonstrates this).

Here’s an image from the Github page showing the included example project:

You can find DLIdeKeyboard on Github here.

A nice straightforward component for adding custom keys.

The NSUserDefaults object is typically used to save/restore your application related preferences, configuration data, etc – see Write and Read User Preferences for more information. In addition to application specifics, there is a system wide default list that is available to all applications, accessible using the class methodstandardUserDefaults in the NSUserDefaults object.

To get a list of the system wide settings:

NSDictionary* defaults = [[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] dictionaryRepresentation];
NSLog(@"Defaults: %@", defaults);

A partial list of the output on my device follows:

Defaults: {
    AppleICUForce24HourTime = 0;
    AppleITunesStoreItemKinds =     (
        wemix,
        podcast,
        ...
    );
    AppleKeyboards =     (
        "en_US@hw=US;sw=QWERTY",
        "zh_Hant-HWR@sw=HWR",
        "emoji@sw=Emoji"
    );
    AppleKeyboardsExpanded = 1;
    AppleLanguages =     (
        en,
        "zh-Hant",
        fr,
        de,
  ...
}

As you can tell, the defaults returned above are contained within a dictionary object. The list of keyboards in the dictionary is stored as an NSArray object. To retrieve the array, simply request the object for the key “AppleKeyboards”

NSArray *array = [[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] objectForKey:@"AppleKeyboards"];
NSLog(@"Keyboards: %@", array);

The output of all the installed international keyboards looks as follows:

Keyboards: (
    "en_US@hw=US;sw=QWERTY",
    "zh_Hant-HWR@sw=HWR",
    "emoji@sw=Emoji"
)