For years iOS has had a ‘system-wide’ font size option that allows you to set a font size of choice. Apps that support it will use the larger font size. Of course virtually no apps ever did support it and my aging eyes have been yearning for the larger screen Android’s out there.
I have had iOS 7 since August but didn’t know about its ‘new’ Dynamic Type option until today. Many apps have updates to be compatible with iOS 7. Flipboard recently included a feature that allowed the user to set a preferred font (Yay! Made it usable). Well, when Flipboard updated itself, it popped up a message that said “We see that you had set a font preference, from now on we will be using your system wide Dynamic Type preference”. Say what? I kinda ignored this until I noticed that my AnyList app (best grocery list app out there by the way) does the same thing. It now supports the system wide Dynamic Type choice. So, I looked it up in settings. In the past iOS gave you a choice of, maybe 6 or 7 font sizes – but, again, the only apps that ever supported that were email and messaging. The new Dynamic Type setting (see image) gives you a much broader array of font sizes to choose from. So, I set it to quite large.
What really surprised me was when I used the iOS maps app in iOS7 to look up an address. For the first time EVER, I could read the street names.
In the past, as I zoomed in on streets in iOS maps, the font size would keep getting smaller as I zoomed in so I could NEVER read the damn street names without my glasses. But now the built in iOS 7 maps app uses the system wide Dynamic Type setting so I can actually read the street names on my iPhone for the first time! Whoot!
Based on the fact that two of my ios7 updated apps already support the Dynamic Type setting, it seems Apple is pushing it in the developer community. If all or most apps support it in the future, it may actually mean I won’t need a larger screen on my next phone. But, what the heck, I still want a larger screen. But if this Dynamic Type choice setting catches on, my iPhone will be MUCH easier to use going forward. I HATE having to carry around reading glasses with me everywhere so I can read my iPhone.
