You don’t even need to subclass NSTextField (or it’s mobile counterpart) with this dirty trick. All you do is save the password somewhere else, and set it to a mask of *’s when you finish editing. All you need is a global NSString called password and a few IBActions.

- (NSString *)username { return [userField text]; }
- (NSString *)password { return password; }

- (IBAction)editingEnded:(id)sender {
        NSString *oldtext = passField.text;
        int len = (oldtext) ? [oldtext length] : 0;
        int i;
        NSString *mask = @"";
        for (i = 0; i < len; i++) {
                mask = [mask stringByAppendingString:@"*"];
        }
        if (password) { [password release]; password = nil; }
        password = oldtext;
        [password retain];
        passField.text = mask;
}

- (IBAction)editingBegan:(id)sender {
        passField.text = password;
}

Cool, no? You don’t even have to draw anything.
There’s probably more elegant approaches, ones that replace the chars as you’re typing, etc. But this works for me

Joe

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 22nd, 2008 at 1:36 pm and is filed under UIKit, Objective C. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.