Category: macOS

A bumpy ride for Apple Advanced Typography

Yes TextKit Does Not Do Real Vertical Text
Yep, TextKit marquee features do not include Vertical Text

One thing has remained constant in Apple’s long strange text layout architecture odyssey from QuickDraw GX to ATSUI to Core Text: with any big change advanced typography is the first casualty. Priorities change, this is natural, but what often happens is a reset back to the basics with advanced typography features restored over time according to new priorities.

Apple Advanced Typography Odyssey Chart
Apple Advanced Typography has had a long strange journey

This is especially true for the higher level text frameworks built on the underlying text architecture as Apple constantly rejiggles priorities of what advanced typography features belong at the high level vs. what stays in the deep dark scary Core Text. Developers stick with what they know instead of adding new text features, so the typography experience of most apps, regardless of platform, remains blah and ‘western centric’.

This is about to get worse as Apple figures out what bits of UIKit (TextKit calling) are going to join macOS and screw hold hands with AppKit.

UIKit and AppKit
When things collide advanced typography is the first casualty, the lowest common denominator wins

Take vertical layout for example. Japan is the last major market that requires it as China, Korea and other Asian countries sold out their rich typography culture and history for western created digital typography technologies that always treated non-western typography as an outliner, never a true equal. Japanese developers had to fight to get basic vertical text support in EPUB v2 and it still sucks getting vertical text EPUB to display or print in WebKit or any web based thing for that matter. Yes, after all this time the World Wide Web is still the Roman Wide Web.

QuickDraw GX, the vision part not the API, was the only major text layout architecture in a major OS I know of that treated all typography from anywhere as one single thing available to all applications. The Steve Jobsian ‘it just works’ for the entire world’s advanced typography. Since then Apple has broken typography features into different bits assigning them to different frameworks: bidirectional layout goes up in the high level, real vertical layout remains down there in Core Text.

AppKit has some high level vertical layout features but nobody uses them, Apple included (ahem Pages), because UIKit and WebKit don’t offer the same. One veteran Japanese font engineer explained the challenges: “UIKit doesn’t support real vertical text layout, the Japanese punctuation and glyph spacing is all wrong. The easier thing for an app developer to do is bundle a display only Japanese vertical font just for displaying vertical text in the app. Go ask the programmers at Monokakido, I’m sure that’s what they have to do with their iOS Japanese dictionary apps.” And so it goes.

It’s not just text layout either. How do OpenType Variable Fonts fit into this picture? How will developers deploy them and users interact with them? The crusty old macOS advanced typography font feature palette model is so passé it’s painful to look at, let alone use. So nobody uses it, I doubt they ever did.

The GX advanced typography vision thing, or any vision thing for that matter, would be a welcome guide map. Apple had it once, let’s hope they find it again. Otherwise it will be a bumpy ride. Again.

WWDC18 Reportage

macOS Mojave Metal Mania

The week after WWDC is like a small hangover, no agony or sharp pain, just the long dull ache of reality setting in after too much manufactured fun. Tech Media coverage of WWDC18 was flat and uninspired, maybe it was the lack of a new hardware announcement or a major new software initiative. The mood was captured by Japanese tech journalist Tsutsumu Ishikawa’s sour tweet, “Come to think of it there wasn’t any NFC announcement.” Come to think of it there actually was, Contactless Passes are a new thing and it will be interesting to see what developers will do with them.

The oddest thing was the reaction to the depreciation of OpenGL and OpenCL in macOS Mojave. It was all here and now hand wringing. No journalist or blogger seemed to be up to the job of putting together the bigger long term picture: that depreciation announcement plus Metal everywhere plus external GPUs, UIKit bits coming to AppKit was all just more writing on the wall that Intel CPU Macs are toast. Wouldn’t it be weird and wonderful if the new Mac Pro turns out to be the coming out party for the Apple A-Series Mac. Watching the media frenzy would be half the fun.

macOS iMessage Location Mystery

UPDATE
macOS Catalina finally solves the iMessage Location issue

One thing I forgot to add to my WWDC18 Wish List was restoring a Location selection to the macOS iMessage account settings. Apple has done a good job integrating iOS and macOS functions over the years, global copy/paste, Handoff, etc., but there are strange and frustrating omissions such as Location in macOS iMessage.

iMessages-Compared.png

Apple ID has a default Location setting that used to be determined by the iTunes account credit card issue country. This isn’t the case anymore, and the country setting in Apple ID settings doesn’t seem to change it either. It’s not a problem on iOS because Location settings in FaceTime and iMessages override default Apple ID country settings to correctly format local country iPhone numbers so they display and message without any problem. iOS iMessage says it best: “Choose a country or region to allow iMessage to message local numbers in your address book.”  I guess Apple means Contacts but we get the meaning.

Once upon a time macOS iMessage had Location selection but it was removed in OS X El Capitan and has not reappeared since. macOS iMessage is basically unusable unless all the iMessage contact numbers are formatted with country codes.iMessages comparison iOS vs macOS

Of course Apple Support advice is: format all of your contact numbers with international prefixes.

No thank you. iOS handles everything flawlessly with a Location setting, please fix macOS iMessage so that it does too.

WWDC18 Wish List

WWDC18 is almost here with the usual wish lists appearing everywhere. Here is mine.

1) CoreText Reboot: as said before it’s time for Apple to revisit their long convoluted advanced layout architecture story yet again and rewrite it. Make Unicode rendering  secure, offload rendering to the GPU, intelligently integrate OpenType Variable Type font capability, not via the creaky, crappy OS X era font pallet, and for goodness sakes migrate real vertical layout and other advanced typography goodies high level as possible across iOS and macOS. You know, the GX Vision thing. And don’t tell me Apple you don’t know what that means.

2) Apple Maps Cartography Reboot: the Justin O’Beirne era cartography must die before Apple Maps can be reborn into a fulfilling useful life. Also please use Japanese data suppliers that actually know how to read and write Japanese, and have been to Japan.

3) Japanese kana sorting that actually works in iCloud Music Library across iOS and macOS.

And please please pretty please fix the iPhone X Suica bug.