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Comment by scrumper | Hacker News Reader

I know this isn't what the article is about, but the new lightweight typeface looks like absolute shit on a non-retina iPad 2. I was very surprised indeed by that (and also by how stressed my iPad 2 seems running the basic OS - animations are labored, scrolling is jerky; it's like Symbian, or old-school Windows Phone). Early beta, fair enough, but the font problem is worrisome and I don't see it getting fixed. I'm curious how it looks on an iPad Mini.

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Apple already bumped the font weight up. Now it’s much closer to something you would see on iOS7 (but it obviously still uses the same system described in the article, so font weight scales with font size).

It’s an easy enough fix once you have a system like this in place. Really, focusing all your attention on that is missing the forest for the trees.

For what it's worth, you could try enabling "Bold Fonts" in the Accessibility settings.

Good suggestion, I'll give that a try. Thanks.

I wouldn't worry about performance too much yet- it's still in beta after all.

I would. But thats whats happens when you have old hardware and software is still progressing at an impressive pace. In fact, many of iOS7 features are only possible because of those advances (layered interfaces, the typography engine, for example). I wouldn't expect the ipad2 to last you much longer than a year (if that..).

I would expect Text Kit (I assume that's what you are referring to by typography engine) to seriously out perform Web Kit on older hardware, such as iPad 2.

UITextView with Web Kit backing has to do so much shit just to render attributed strings. It's slow as hell. Text Kit provides a clean layering atop Core Text with a fast way to update the model.

When I installed the iOS6 beta on my iPad 3, maps literally ran at something like 15fps until close to release. Now it's fine. I think iOS7 will probably be similar.

I'm curious—does it still look like absolute shit if you rotate the screen?

There's no LCD subpixel smoothing in iOS, so it shouldn't make a difference.

Perhaps it's just a WebKit bug, but I've definitely noticed this before in an older iPad: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3220662/uiwebview-font-is...

I've noticed this effect also, and across a number of apps, on both an iPad 4 and an iPad mini. It's most obvious on the mini due to the low pixel density on the iPad mini.

I can't read the mini in portrait mode mostly because I haven't found a font+size combo that I find acceptable.

Yes, it still looks pretty bad. It looks like it matters a lot more with the thinner font in iOS 7 whether the straight line strokes sit across a physical pixel boundary or not.

They are also using more computationally-heavy transitions and such. Perhaps Apple wants to pursue a look that suits only powerful devices with high-resolution screens.

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