An iOS 4 disappointment
July 2, 2010 at 9:33 AM by Dr. Drang
My biggest disappointment with iOS 4 isn’t the somewhat clumsy double-click required to use fast app switching, it’s the lack of a decent monospaced font.
Monospaced fonts are usually thought of as programmers’ fonts, but they’re helpful any time you need vertical alignment of plain text. Many of the files I keep in Simplenote are tables of information, and although I’ve come up with a half-assed way of getting the columns to nearly align, things would be so much easier—and more portable—if I could just switch to a monospaced font.
Yes, iOS 4, like its predecessors, does have a couple of monospaced fonts: Courier and Courier New. But no one really wants to use such ugly fonts. When Apple introduced Menlo with the release of Snow Leopard, I was really hoping it would be included in the next iPhone OS release. Unless the Fonts app is lying to me, that didn’t happen.
Back in the days when Inside Macintosh ruled the Apple programming world, there was a way for developers to ensure that certain fonts were available for their applications: they could include them in the resource fork of the app. I don’t know if a similar thing is possible with iPhone apps, but I’d jump to a note-taking app that had easy online syncing and a decent monospaced font.
