A Plea for Better iOS Text Facilities

January 31st, 2012

Buzz Andersen:

Awhile back, Jacqui Cheng from Ars Technica contacted a bunch of folks (including me) for a story she was putting together about what iOS devs would most like to see from Apple in 2012. Unfortunately I never got around to responding (sorry Jacqui—the holidays were crazy), but if I had, one item would have stood an order of magnitude above everything else on my list: better rich text formatting support in the middle layers of Apple’s development frameworks.

Now this may sound like a surprisingly mundane request considering the number of whiz bang things people are expecting from Apple in 2012, but if you’ve ever tried to develop a native iOS applications that present textual content downloaded from the Internet, you probably share my frustration.

So, so right.