Or, we can trim longer texts into previews without being limited to options like before/after/middle developers can define those options however they want. So, for example, it will soon be possible while composing in iOS to have the color of text change if the app recognizes a specific dynamic element (a hashtag, a Twitter account name, or the like). There are exciting new possibilities hiding behind the labels “Interactive Text Color”, “Text Folding”, and “Custom Truncation”. So what do all these new options mean, practically speaking? Developers can now drop long-form texts into reader-friendly, attractive layouts, with multiple columns and with image layers that aren’t chained to the grid. The bad news: this means existing text-heavy apps will have to be redeveloped in order to support all these nifty new features.Īpple has rebuilt the text layout architecture in iOS 7, allowing developers to build control over the behavior of text and fonts into the user interfaces of their apps, with a level of dynamic freedom unheard-of before. The good news: this means the seamless integration of animation and text (the same principle behind UICollectionView and UITableView) for the first time ever in the history of iOS. To make that possible, Apple has revised UITextView, UITextLabel, and UILabel.
Ios uifont helvetica neue light full#
Those settings give developers full control over all Core Text functions, so they can choose very precisely how text will behave in all user interface elements. Text Kit is a fast, modern layout- and text-rendering engine, easy to maintain through settings integrated into the User Interface Kit. But now, no one needs to struggle with it, because Text Kit is there to act as an interpreter.
Text Kit is built over Core Text, a sophisticated Unicode layout engine with a lot of power, the potential of which unfortunately hasn’t been very easy to tap in the past. Behind this name is a new API (application programming interface) for developers of apps in which text plays a critical role. In his session, Ian Baird, the person in Cupertino responsible for how Apple’s mobile products handle text, showed off what he called the “coolest feature in iOS 7”: Text Kit. No, text and words aren’t sinking ships in iOS 7.
This was largely because of the presentations from Apple’s engineers devoted to ways the OS would handle fonts, in which they revealed the first details of the new technology. People did calm down over the subsequent days of the week-long conference. that no one commenting on the keynote said a word about iOS’s underlying font technology, which has obviously changed.that you can’t judge the effectiveness of a typeface in a dynamic OS from videos or screenshots.that it will take at least another four months for the final version of iOS 7 to reach the market.I should remind the early birds who were already chirping during the keynote: iOS 7 choices could make me run for the hills. Low foreground/background contrast & lighter weight Helvetica trending illegible.Ģ/2 Existing iOS Helvetica UI font was already anti-legibility. Īnd two days later, Thomas Phinney (formerly in the type team at Adobe) also took iOS 7’s typography to task:ġ/2 iOS 7 preview: horrible type. Why iOS 7 looks like a makeup counter at Macy's: My thoughts on iOS 7's use of Helvetica Neue Ultra Light. The next morning former New York Times art director Khoi Vinh compared the look of the new iOS to a cosmetics department: “Skinny font as seen on the iOS 7 banner at WWDC.” Please, no. The day before the announcement, our friend Stephen Coles was already deeply worried about the light weight of Helvetica on the display banners hanging at the WWDC venue in San Francisco: The live-streaming keynote address from the WWDC developer’s conference last Monday hadn’t even started before the first typophiles started sharing their concerns on Twitter. There was no shortage of long-distance diagnoses of the typography in Apple’s recently presented mobile interface, iOS 7. The English translation for is by Maurice Meilleur. This article by Jürgen Siebert was first posted on Jto the German. Written by Jürgen Siebert on July 1, 2013 Beyond Helvetica: The Real Story Behind Fonts in iOS 7
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