In a program I was working on, I decided to use Dynamic Type.  You can read about it here, but suffice it to say, it is a new way of handling text sizes in iOS7.  The user can set a value in their iOS device’s settings to set all text to be bigger or smaller than default, for any app that implements Dynamic Type.  This is a bit more advanced than my other posts, but it is surprisingly easy to do, so I thought I would write a post about what I learned.

Setup and using preferredFontForTextStyle

First off, you have to create an outlet for any label, textfield, or whatever you have that you want to dynamically change the text size of, so as to have a place to set the font.  The easiest way to do this is to use the assistant editor on your view, and command+drag your text control to the assistant editor (in the @interface area of your .m for a private outlet).  Once you release it will ask you a few questions, and the defaults are fine usually, so you just have to give it a name.

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Let’s say you are programming a flashcard app.  In the model for these flashcards, you will have a flashcard object, and each flashcard has 2 strings as properties (one for the front of the card, and one for the back).  You could just alloc-init the card, and then set them later… but what use is a blank flashcard?  Why not only initialize a flashcard when those piece of data are provided?  That is what custom initializers are for.

Here is an example of making this flashcard class with its own custom initializer.

In FlashCard.h:

@interface FlashCard : NSObject

@property (strong, nonatomic) NSString *frontText;
@property (strong, nonatomic) NSString *backText;

- (instancetype)initWithFront:(NSString *)onFront back:(NSString *)onBack;

@end

In FlashCard.m:

#import "FlashCard.h" 

@implementation FlashCard

- (instancetype)initWithFront:(NSString *)onFront back:(NSString *)onBack
{
    if ((self = [super init])) {
        _frontText = onFront;
        _backText = onBack;
    }
    return self;
} 

@end

And that is pretty much all there is to it.  While it is not a lot of text, there are a few things that I had to look up a bit to understand what was going on in these statements, so I will go into more depth to explain some of the new things shown here.

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