Without discussing the specifics I just wanted to make a quick note that Phiware now has a working prototype for a rich text editor for the iPad, including custom text layout and fonts, and selection based editing complete with text magnifier. Plans are being made to release a feature rich and easy to use library to be made available to other developers. If you are interested please contact us.

Today, I read this post to the Apple Developer Forums: Custom Keyboards (you must be a registered iPhone developer to read it), and started thinking. Clearly, I want to replicate Apple's magnifier (with some small aesthetic deviations) for the users' sake. The user expects the magnifier to look big and round, anything else might 'disorientate' and confuse them. But, perhaps I'm not giving the typical iPhone user enough credit, and besides what happens if Apple decide to change their magnifier (which has happened in the past). What am I to do?

It is a sensible suggestion to give Phiware's magnifier a visually distinct appearance. In fact, it is a simple exercise to subclass PhiTextMagnifier to achieve this (with no private API calls!) But this is just a little sneak peak… again, I encourage you to contact us for more details.