Here's a little insight into a little project I've been working on today. Figured I would take a little picture and talk more about the process of getting text on the iPhone.
Here is a little demo app of a text rendering engine Mike wrote up so that we couple play around with typography. Text is obviously a huge part of any application and we need to learn more about it if we're going to develop successful applications. If you take a look at the screen shot, you'll see us trying out different fonts out to learn more about spacing, rendering, etc.
All we needed for this test were a couple sentences, numbers, etc. We wanted to check out how different fonts looked when rendered on the iPhone screen, so we placed out about five or so different common types of font families just so we could see how they looked in action.
The great thing about the iPhone simulator is that we can check out all of these fonts in action to see exactly what they will look like when on the phone. We play around with them a bit, scroll down the page, and pretty much do anything we need to just to imagine what it will be like if this text was to go into an app and you were to read it on your device. You may think that font selection and placing is a less important part of application design, but for us it's incredibly important. In most applications, you need the font to gain understand and use the application. As a quick test right now, go check out some of your favorite websites that really capture your attention. Go check out some of the world's most popular websites like The New York Times, Digg, Facebook, Google, etc. Now perform a Google search for "worst websites" and do some browsing for a couple minutes. Just check out the difference in typography between the leaders and the losers. Obviously these are extreme examples, but they just go to show how important typography can be when developing any product, not just an iPhone application.
Here is a little demo app of a text rendering engine Mike wrote up so that we couple play around with typography. Text is obviously a huge part of any application and we need to learn more about it if we're going to develop successful applications. If you take a look at the screen shot, you'll see us trying out different fonts out to learn more about spacing, rendering, etc.
All we needed for this test were a couple sentences, numbers, etc. We wanted to check out how different fonts looked when rendered on the iPhone screen, so we placed out about five or so different common types of font families just so we could see how they looked in action.
The great thing about the iPhone simulator is that we can check out all of these fonts in action to see exactly what they will look like when on the phone. We play around with them a bit, scroll down the page, and pretty much do anything we need to just to imagine what it will be like if this text was to go into an app and you were to read it on your device. You may think that font selection and placing is a less important part of application design, but for us it's incredibly important. In most applications, you need the font to gain understand and use the application. As a quick test right now, go check out some of your favorite websites that really capture your attention. Go check out some of the world's most popular websites like The New York Times, Digg, Facebook, Google, etc. Now perform a Google search for "worst websites" and do some browsing for a couple minutes. Just check out the difference in typography between the leaders and the losers. Obviously these are extreme examples, but they just go to show how important typography can be when developing any product, not just an iPhone application.
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