A simple scrolling UILabel for iPhone devs

Here's a simple class which mimics the most common features of a UILabel, yet will act like a horizontally scrolling marquee. It is actually a subclass of UIScrollView, so to use it with Interface Builder, you will need to create a UIScrollView item and then change its class to this class - which I called AutoScrollLabel.

If you don't care about the technical details of how it works and just want to use it, you can download the class files here:

http://stormyprods.com/sampleCode/AutoScrollLabel.zip

To use the class, simply set the text and if the text is wider than the allocated space in the view, it will automatically scroll. Here's a very simple example:

  autoScrollLabel.text = @"Hi Mom!  How are you?  I really ought to write more often.";
  autoScrollLabel.textColor = [UIColor yellowColor];

The class also supports the font property, so you can set the font as you normally would for a UILabel.

In addition, there are a few properties related to the scrolling:

scrollDirection: set to AUTO_SCROLL_LEFT (default) or AUTO_SCROLL_RIGHT
scrollSpeed: set to the number of pixels per second (default is 30)
pauseInterval: set to the number of seconds to pause when the end of the text is reached. (default is 0.5)
bufferSpaceBetweenLabels: how much blank space between the end of the text and the beginning of the next instance

It turns out this autoscrolling feature was fairly easy to implement. I'm surprised there isn't already something like this in the SDK. The scrolling is implemented using two UILabels contained in a UIScrollView. Each label contains an identical copy of the text and the labels are resized to be just large enough to hold the text without any truncation.

If the text in the UILabel is wider than the containing UIScrollView, then the two UILabels are laid out side-by-side, and the scroll view is animated to scroll from the beginning of one label to the beginning of the next label. The second label is there just to give the illusion of the text looping forever.

The class registers itself as the delegate for the scrolling animation block, so when the animation block ends, it waits the defined pause time, and then just performs another animated scroll, in which case the scroll view is reset back to the beginning of the first label and the process is repeated.

And that's it! Pretty simple. The animation block feature of a UIView does all the hard work.

I hope others find this useful. If you notice any problems in the code, please let me know.