“In his [WWDC 2013] 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,” Jürgen Siebert and Maurice Meilleur report for Typographica. “Behind this name is a new API (application programming interface) for developers of apps in which text plays a critical role. 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. But now, no one needs to struggle with it, because Text Kit is there to act as an interpreter.”
Siebert and Meilleur report, “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. The bad news: this means existing text-heavy apps will have to be redeveloped in order to support all these nifty new features. 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.”
“But the hottest typographic number in iOS 7 is Dynamic Type,” Siebert and Meilleur report. “As far as I know, Apple’s mobile products will be the first electronic devices that will by default consider a quality of type that hasn’t been given so much attention since the age of letterpress. That’s right: we’re talking about an operating system, not an application or a layout job.”
“Thanks to Dynamic Type, users can now use sliders (with seven stops, found under Settings > General > Text Size) to adjust the text size in every app according to their own taste,” Siebert and Meilleur report. “And in case the largest size isn’t large enough, those with impaired vision can find under Settings > General > Accessibility a way to turn Dynamic Type up to its maximum size, options to “improve legibility” (which sets the text over a light gradient without changing its size), and optimize the background contrast.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Spark” for the heads up.]