Back in the iPhone OS 3.x days, I would stare longingly at the Settings bundles in Apple’s built-in iPhone apps:
If an app wanted explanatory text in the Settings app, you pretty much had to make do with Titles and Group titles. Ugly.
It turns out that in iOS 4.0 and higher, Apple allowed for third-party apps to have descriptive text too. And I only found out about this last week (I noticed its use in the Ladidude app).
The longer descriptive text is called “Footer text” in Apple’s nomenclature, and can be attached to any Group. To add your own, do the following:
- Open your Settings.bundle Root.plist in Xcode
- Go to the group you want footer text attached to.
- Add a new Item to the Group and edit the key to be “FooterText” (you’ll have to type “FooterText” in manually):
- The set the value to whatever text you want to show up. If you need to insert linefeeds, type option-Enter.
- Now you can visit your app’s settings in the Settings app. It should look something like this:
If your app is compatible with iPhone OS 3.x as well, not to worry: the extra FooterText key is simply ignored on pre-iOS4 devices.
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