Is text editor too complicated for iOS app development? Twitter launches open source API

Twitter today announced the launch of an "independent, flexible" open source API - Twitter Text Editor, which provides iOS developers with an in-app text editor. This is the same tweet edit box and Fleet editor used on the Twitter app for iOS. In today's announcement, Twitter said it is well aware that implementing a simple text editor in an iOS app is very complex, which is why Twitter provides the text editor API to everyone.

Twitter said the new text editor API solves common problems related to syntax highlighting and text content filtering. The company claims that Apple provides developers with a variety of text editing APIs, but they can be very limited or too complex to understand.

The high-level APIs do not provide enough functionality and control to create truly great in-app experiences. The lower-level APIs require a lot of knowledge about how text editing works in multiple languages, including support for bidirectional scripts, alternative input methods (such as those used for East Asian languages), and assistive technologies such as Braille keyboards.

The Twitter text editor encapsulates UITextView and provides a familiar delegate-based API, such as many common UIKit APIs. It extends LayoutManager and TextStorage to provide custom text properties, including properties for rendering custom emojis. The Twitter text editor has an event dispatcher to handle events, providing a consistent order of delegate callbacks for your code.