This weekend was Voices That Matter Seattle. It was my second time attending VTM and second time speaking. I have to say this latest installment of VTM was even better than the last one in Philly.

My conference weekend kicked off on Friday with a full day workshop learning Cocos2D. This workshop was full of juicy awesome goodness, and for the first time in my career I feel like I now know how to write a game. In fact I have a new game idea brewing in my head as I type this. Rod Strougo and Ray Wenderlich did an outstanding job putting together and teaching the full day workshop.

VTM continued to impress for the next two days. Some highlights for me included:

• Mike Lee’s keynote. I was especially moved by the part where Mike talked about our wonderful iOS and Mac developer community.
• Hearing Graeme Devine talk on Game Center and the Art of Addictive Games and getting to meet him. We had some good chats. It wasn’t until later I found out who he really is.
• Meeting Kevin Callahan and getting the one-on-one demo of Accessorizer. This app is awesome and does so much to make you more productive in Xcode.
• And of course catching up with old friends and making new ones (too many to list here).

Thanks to the VTM organizers for putting on a great event, and special thanks to Chuck for getting me from and to the airport.

I decided one of my apps should display placeholder text in a text view. Unfortunately UITextView does not have a placeholder property. I’ve always thought this is odd especially given the fact that UITextField has a placeholder property.

I googled to see what others have done. I found some good approaches but no one solution that I liked. So I decided to write my own borrowing from the various ideas of others. The end result is KTTextView.

KTTextView derives from UITextView and enhances it with new features. At the moment the only new feature is the placeholder text. The placeholderText property works same as UITextField’s placeholder property. I also added the property placeholderColor in case an app has the need to use a color different then the default placeholder color.

KTTextView is hosted on github. The project includes a sample app showing how to use KTTextView. I plan to add more features as time allows. One feature I want to add is an option to display the text view in a rounded rectangle giving it a similar look to UITextField. In the meantime, I hope you find the KTTextView’s current implementation useful.