iOS 7 brings along new rules and new Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) that should be followed by all developers. One of those guidelines regarding the all brand-new look and feel, highlights the fact that an application’s interface should not compete with the content, nor distracting users from it, but supporting it in the best possible way. This fact is called deference and, along with some more new HI guidelines, makes clear that Apple with iOS 7 focuses on the content and on the way it’s presented. This is more apparent if we consider the flatten, simple and uncluttered UI, full of white space that makes more room for the content to be displayed. Thankfully, Apple supports developers in their effort to give prominence to their app content, and to text content especially, by introducing a new tool, named Text Kit.
Text Kit is part of the UIKit framework, and it consists of a collection of classes that enable developers to manage text and all of its attributes, as well as to display it in various ways, using new great methods and with a little effort. Indeed, prior to Text Kit and iOS 7, advanced text manipulation was really hard to be performed. In the need of modifying text details, such as font or layout attributes, one had to deal with Core Text, a powerful framework, yet hard to work with. Further than that, only UIWebView views were able to display formatted text. Things became better in iOS 6 with attributed strings, where UITextView views could also display rich text, but yet getting into advanced handling still remained a tricky task.
