Quacks like a Mac
We wrote some text recently about how Apple’s recent software redesign speaks to the ongoing psychospiritual impoverishment of the tech industry. It is a reactive move, indicating a sickness, and now we’re all going to associate this new interface with the ongoing apocalypse.
I’m typing this on an iPad Pro, which is a $1,500 typewriter with a very sophisticated pencil attachment. The only professional computing application on this device involves the pencil. You download a pencil-y app, probably the excellent Procreate, and you do pencil-y things with it. If you’re an artist or architect, you love the pencil, and so you love the iPad.
Professional computing goes beyond this, of course, and the iPad should theoretically work for a lot of other things: music, video, photos, etc. And it can. But professional computing is about workflows, about the reduction of friction, and the iPad’s software creates so much friction to make professional computing useless outside of the pencil.
This is separate from multitasking, which they are apparently fixing. Professional computing mostly has to do with keyboard shortcuts, correct sync, and file management. And nowhere, as a designer, does this fail more for me than in the iPad’s handling of fonts.
Apple’s official instructions for installing fonts on the iPad involve your download “an app containing fonts” and using the app to install your fonts. Apps must be pre-approved to contain fonts, and the fonts must be specific to the app.
This does not reflect the way that fonts work for almost everyone. Fonts are licensed to you, downloaded, and installed separately from any iPad app. Apple does this because they believe fonts are a security risk for the iPad, and so they lock down the ability for you to install your own fonts on your own device.
And so people have taken it upon themselves to hack it. You can install this app, which bundles a certain subset of fonts into a configuration profile, which you then install to your device.
Theoretically, apps recognize the fonts you install this way and then support them, but not all do. And sometimes the profiles disappear when you update your device’s software. And if you want to add a new font, you have to install a whole new profile. If you want to remove a font that’s part of a larger tranche you installed, you have to remove the whole profile, create a new bundle, and install that, instead.
We return, in this moment, to the idea of friction. You created a document on Pages on your Mac, a professional computing platform; and you want to use it on Pages on iPad, which is not one. You open the file on iPad and see that none of the fonts load. You plug your iPad into your Mac, build a configuration profile with the relevant fonts, install them, and open Pages. This might work. Some time later, you reopen that file on your iPad and see that the fonts again do not load, so you do it all again.
Every year, I balefully joke that this year Apple will support fonts on the iPad correctly, with a real font manager that loads fonts and installs them and does not forget about them. People laugh at me because the idea is so long-tail, so specific, that it surely cannot matter.
But the underlying spirit behind the argument is quite serious. The iPad came out right around the nadir of Apple’s support of professional computing. Over on the Mac, many professionals were wondering what to do, whether to switch platforms, whether to hold onto their old hardware or not. The iPad failing to support correct font management over 14 years is a symptom of the same mindset, of load-bearing decisions being released way back when, and us all having to suffer for it.
I’m a designer. I make books sometimes. I use fonts to do my job. And instead of doing my job on this thing, I’m using it to type & doodle. This is all a long way of saying that maybe if you get an iPad, it shouldn’t have “pro” in the name?