LockLines
Design Mac lock screen messages that fit
53 followers
Design Mac lock screen messages that fit
53 followers
LockLines is a macOS app for designing plain-text lock screen messages that fit the small message area.
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@ighor best of luck with today's launch. At £0.99 I decided to download and have a play. Nice UI and idea, what would be great would be to make the change to the settings automatically if possible.
@codeandsea Thanks! I'm happy to hear that. Within the Mac App Store, it is difficult to make it automatically applied, I'll keep searching for a solution.
@ighor Thanks, that would polish the app, best of luck.
I like the minimalistic look that is not that disturbing. :)
the "fit the small message area" framing is the smart part here, most people find out their lock screen message got truncated by trial and error. is it just character-counting against Apple's limit, or does it actually render a live preview against the real font metrics so you know before you save it
@galdayan I’m glad you asked. I have created hundreds of samples of lines of different kinds of characters. I have placed them as a huge list in the lock screen and manually fixed those which did not fit or didn’t fill full width. That way I created a verified database of characters tested to use the exact width of visible space. Next I tweaked fonts and font configs, distance between letters and lines to make it match exactly the way Apple did the lock screen message. It allowed me to render it in my app exactly as you would see it once defined to the lock screen. That’s how I made LockLines.
@ighor that's a genuinely hard way to earn a spec nobody publishes. one thing i'd wonder about long term, when Apple ships an OS update that tweaks the lock screen font or spacing even slightly, does your verified database silently go stale until someone notices, or do you have a way to catch that drift before users do
@galdayan I test myself on every macOS. I confirm that the font is exactly the same on all macOS I tested. And prior to macOS 14 there were different text field sizes. I’ll test on every new macOS update and make adjustments if needed.
@galdayan I would not think that it is really brittle. I tested macOS 10.9+ and I can say that all macOS I tested used exactly the same font metrics, so that thing is unlikely to change. What changed is viewport width and lines visible, it became larger since macOS 14. I would say we have chances that the viewport may become larger, but a low chance that font metrics change.