I recently came across some labels in a design I’ve been working on that I originally deployed using NSLineBreakMode.ByTruncatingTail. Conscious of a possible situation where text coming into the system might not properly fit. It works. But guess what? After looking at some truncated text in my application I felt like other users probably will… ripped off.
Since that incoming data could get truncated in a strange place, the information might very well become unusable for a user. Or confusing. And it felt like the developer/designer didn’t care much about the user and decided to cut bait and jump in the Jeep and head for home. Leaving a user to deal with the mess.
So I ripped up the underlying UI elements. I thought it was going to be a bit of a mess, but it took me less than fifteen minutes to deploy a few MarqueeLabels. Elegant. Smooth. Data not hidden.
Now, the text I have coming in are pretty low in character count, so there won’t be a marquee with hundreds of characters. That would produce too much cognitive load for a user, and I wouldn’t use a UILabel for such a thing anyway.
So in short, remember to code the extra mile. And put some Leftfield in your cans while you’re coding. It pushes me a bit when normally I’d finished a commit and wanted to leave things alone.