Show relative date or time, not both on iOS?

Question

I'm currently doing this:

NSDateFormater *dateFormat = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[dateFormat setDateStyle:NSDateFormatterMediumStyle];
[dateFormat setTimeStyle:NSDateFormatterShortStyle];
[dateFormat setDoesRelativeDateFormatting:YES];

...

label.text = [dateFormat stringFromDate:thedate];

And this is producing:

Today, 1:00 PM
Yesterday, 1:00 PM
Oct 5, 2012, 1:00 PM
Oct 5, 2013, 1:00 PM

What I want is this:

1:00 PM
Yesterday
Oct 5
Oct 5 2013

Showing current year is OK (3rd line). At the very least the time should show only if it's today. On the iPhone the recent calls list does this. I need to do this because I have very little space for the date.

(Something like isEqualToString@"Today" will not work - This only works for English)

What's the easiest way to do this?

Answer 1

You'll have to write your own formatters to deal with this.

Have a look at https://github.com/mattt/FormatterKit to see how you could go about it.