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Gruber hacks iPhone Notes with Helvetica

Regular readers of Daring Fireball know John Gruber has an almost unhealthy fascination with the Helvetica font, but sometimes fanaticism pays positive results. Today he posted a hack to make the iPhone Notes application use Helvetica rather than the much despised Marker Felt font. The hack involves actually modifying the MobileNotes.app binary with a hex editor on your Mac and is thus probably not for the faint of heart. Needless to say you'll also need to have already hacked the iPhone enough to get access to the MobileNotes.app binary in the first place, but if you just can't stand Marker Felt here's a way to fix it. Gruber also warns, however, that there's no telling how long this hack will work, particularly with the forthcoming firmware update.

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Hacks iPhone

Regular readers of Daring Fireball know John Gruber has an almost unhealthy fascination with the Helvetica font, but sometimes fanaticism...
 

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Doug

I think this is great - I have also see and tried many of the aplication hacks and they make the phone even better - I wish someone (maybe you) could write a hack to delete mutiple e-mails - then the phone will be almost perfect.

September 27 2007 at 7:41 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
basscadet

Marker Felt + Comic Sans = fonts of the devil

well done John Gruber ^_^

September 26 2007 at 9:18 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
roobois

Helvetica? Plain Helvetica? Ugh. You should be using Helvetica Neue. Gruber should know better.

September 25 2007 at 7:47 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
john russell

Now if only we could just simply replace all instances of Arial with Helvetica. I think it would make the world a better place.

September 25 2007 at 6:06 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
superpixel

yeah, Marker Felt, gotta love it. just screams "enterprise" don't it? I hear the next iteration of xserves will come in Dalmation and Flower Power as well. yeesh.

September 25 2007 at 4:37 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Fritz Laurel

@Daniel -- Yeah, I'd say that's a problem larger than missing just Helvetica. You might try finding your answer at the other blog, then, The Unofficial Microsoft Weblog. ;)

Actually, I'd suggest checking the Office install disk for extra fonts. Office usually comes with fonts as well. You do have the Office install disk, right?

Cheers,
FL

September 25 2007 at 4:10 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Daniel

Haha, the problem is I have the other OS, AKA Windows. =)

September 25 2007 at 4:04 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Fritz Laurel

@Daniel -- Helvetica comes installed with OSX. You should already have multiple flavors of Helvetica on your Mac. If not, then you probably have problems larger than just missing Helvetica.

Cheers,
FL

September 25 2007 at 4:02 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Daniel

I am looking for the Helvetica font for use in Word, etc. Any help would be appreciated.

September 25 2007 at 3:46 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Mitch

I followed Gruber's directions and it worked fine.

#3 - The font is already on the iPhone.

September 25 2007 at 3:31 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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