UIAlertView replacement

Question

It seems that I am always fighting with UIAlertView to make it do what I want. I'm done fighting - are there any robust UIAlertView replacements with the following features, or will I need to write my own?:

• ability to customize the alert-view size/position
• ability to change the layout of the buttons (stacked vs. side-by-side)
• ability to prompt users for input via UITextField or UITextView
• resizing / repositioning behavior when the keyboard appears
• ability to have a UITextView for scrolling text
• pixel-perfect copy of UIAlertView for basic display
• ideally interface compatible with UIAlertView - i.e. it is a drop-in-replacement.

I've found a few blog and stackoverflow posts which implement customizations on a UIAlertView - this is NOT what I want. Nor do I want a guide on how to implement a custom AlertView -- I know how, I just want to find one that is already community maintained. I want a ground-up replacement that is safe for App Store submission and future-proof against UIAlertView changes (yes, I've been burnt...)

Please respond with comments if you have suggestions for other desirable features.

Answer 1

Answering my own question.

I searched high and low for a prefab UIAlertView project that offered the features I was looking for. I'm sure they exist -- I've seen apps with great alerts. Their authors must not be sharing - which is totally fine, I understand.

So I wrote my own. TSAlertView is a ground-up implementation of a modal alert view that is interface-compatible with UIAlertView. In terms of visual look, while it is not a pixel-perfect copy, it comes very close. The features it offers are basically what I outlined in the original question:

• ability to set the display-width and max-height of the alert view. This allows me to have nicer looking alerts on iPad.

• ability to specify the layout of the buttons (stacked vs. side-by-side), even if there are only two buttons. This always bothered me with UIAlertView -- if I had two buttons they were always placed side-by-side. A big problem if the button text didn't fit.

• ability to prompt users for input via a UITextField. Once in a while you just need a quick and dirty way to prompt the user to enter something.

• resizing / repositioning behavior when the keyboard appears. (happens when prompting for user-input)

• ability to have a UITextView for scrolling text. Can explicitly set this option instead of relying on UIAlertView to swap in a UITextView for long text.

• near pixel-perfect copy of UIAlertView for basic display.

• support for custom backgrounds

• is interface compatible with UIAlertView - i.e. it is a drop-in-replacement.

I've used a handful of great open-source projects in my code in the last year. My two favorites are MBProgressHUD and MGSplitViewController, each hosted at github. I decided to share TSAlertView in the same manner.

https://github.com/TomSwift/TSAlertView

The initial implementation surely has some bugs. I haven't used it in a shipping project yet, but I am using it in my current project to be completed in a few weeks. If you want to try using it yourself, please feel free. Post any issues on github, or better yet, submit a fix.

Enjoy!

Here are some screenshots showing 1) 2 stacked buttons 2) input capability 3) explicit width setting