KeyboardKit 6.8 is out

Jan 4, 2023 · Follow on Twitter and Mastodon

KeyboardKit 6.8 is out, with many new locales and a new pro keyboard layout provider setup. This release adds 5 new locales, which brings the number of supported locales to 60!

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New locales

KeyboardKit 6.8 adds five new locales:

  • 🇦🇲 Armenian
  • 🏳️ Cherokee
  • 🇮🇩 Indonesian
  • 🇲🇾 Malay
  • 🇺🇿 Uzbek

To get locales like Armenian to work, this version starts to break up the keyboard layout engine in smaller parts, to make it easier to manage locale-specific locales as the number of locales grow.

Keyboard layout provider changes

The keyboard layout engine currently handles locale-specific changes in various ways for iPhone and iPad. However, this logic has grown messy and increasingly hard to manage over time.

KeyboardKit 6.8 therefore adds a new pro keyboard layout provider layer to the Pro library. This is currently used by the new Armenian and Cherokee locales, but will eventually have a unique layout provider for each locale, even if the locale uses a standard layout.

IMPORTANT Since these new providers require a Pro license, you must now register custom layout providers after registering your license, if you want to use a standard provider with Pro providers. The setupPro function has therefore been extended with a new configuration action, which will be performed after registering the license, but before setting up the view. Have a look at the demo to see how this is done.

Dictation replacement changes

Due to the layout engine changes, the dictation replacement is now specified in KeyboardContext instead of for each layout provider. This makes the providers cleaner.

Full document context

The UITextDocumentProxy extensions in KeyboardKit Pro, that lets you read the full document context (text) of a document, has been adjusted and stabilized.

For instance, FullDocumentContextConfiguration has adjusted delays to make the operation more stable. Furthermore, FullDocumentContextResult contains more information and the read operation will throw an error if there is already an active operation, since this caused a bug.

Conclusion

KeyboardKit 6.8 is a big release that brings a lot of new features and adjustments to the table. See the release notes for more details about this release.