How to change the colour of a UITextField's placeholder text for iOS7

Working with UITextFields is generally quite easy, you can customise most attributes apart from the placeholder text, while you can obviously change the text you can't change the colour of the text or it's position. This was a problem we had on a recent project, our design required us to have UITextFields with black backgrounds, the placeholder text colour is dark grey which is almost invisible in our app and Apple provides no easy way to change this.

We solved this by subclassing UITextField and overriding drawPlaceholderInRect: method to draw our own placeholder text. This is fairly straight forward in iOS6 but did not work as expected in iOS 7.

- (void)drawPlaceholderInRect:(CGRect)rect

{  

 UIColor *colour = [UIColor lightGrayColor]

if ([self.placeholder respondsToSelector:@selector(drawInRect:withAttributes:)]

{

     // iOS7 and later

     NSDictionary *attributes = @{NSForegroundColorAttributeName: colour, 

     NSFontAttributeName: self.font};

     CGRect boundingRect = [self.placeholder boundingRectWithSize:rect.size 

     options:0 attributes:attributes context:nil];  

             [self.placeholder drawAtPoint:CGPointMake(0, (rect.size.height/2)

      -boundingRect.size.height/2) withAttributes:attributes];
    }else{
                     // iOS 6
        [colour setFill];
         [self.placeholder drawInRect:rect withFont:self.font
        lineBreakMode:NSLineBreakByTruncatingTail 
               alignment:self.textAlignment]: 
       } 
}