title: iPhone UILabel text soft shadow
body: <p>I know soft shadows are not supported by the UILabel out of the box, on the iPhone. So what would be the best way to implement my own one?</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT:</strong></p>
  
  <p>Obviously I will subclass the <code>UILabel</code> and draw in the -drawRect:
  My question is, how do I get the contents of the label as graphics and draw around them, blur them etc...</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT 2:</strong></p>
  
  <p>I returned to this question about a year later. In the meantime I've built a class that allows you to easily add soft shadow to a label and tweak it's radius etc and also to draw gradients on the text itself. You can find it on GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/doukasd/iOS-Components/tree/master/Views" rel="noreferrer">https://github.com/doukasd/iOS-Components/tree/master/Views</a></p>