Creating Apps for a Global Audience

• Use Formatters

• Use storyboards with auto layout

• Use UIStackViews and UICollectionViews as much as possible

• When designing constraints, think about:

  • text that can be much shorter/longer

  • Directionality (right to left languages)

• After opening a .storyboard file, open the assistant editor (cmd+opt+enter), select the storyboard (preview) option and now at the bottom right you can preview your view in different languages without the need to run the app:

• How to check if a font supports a certain language? In every mac there’s a tool called Font Book where you can search by language and it displays all the (installed) fonts that support that language.

• Very much like on .css files, even on iOS/macOS you can define a Cascade List to revert to different fonts in case one language is not supported by the current selected font (if you don’t declare a cascade list, iOS will always fall back to the system font):

// Custom Font with Cascade List 

guard let font = UIFont (name: "SignPainter-HouseScript", size: UIFont.labelFontSize) else { 
  // Handle error
}

// Create Cascade List 
let cascadeList = [UIFontDescriptor(fontAttributes: [.name: "HanziPenTC-W5"])] 
let cascadedFontDescriptor = font.fontDescriptor.addingAttributes([.cascadelist: cascadeList])
let cascadedFont = UIFont(descriptor: cascadedFontDescriptor, size: font. pointSize)

// Handle Text Size (Dynamic Type)
label.font = UIFontMetrics.default.scaledFont(for: cascadedFont)
label.adjustsFontForContentSizeCategory = true 

• macOS Mojave has a new “word-of-the-day” screensaver

• For word emphasis, do not use italics, it doesn’t work in most of the languages, and if you use numbers, those will be the only thing italicized in your text 👎🏻. Bold is a better alternative.

• For character emphasis, use different colors (bold doesn’t work for structural languages such as Hindi and Korean), use AttributedStrings.