Tact 1.9 has three visible changes.

Typography tweaks

Typography defines so much of the feel of everything visible around us, from digital apps to books to billboards. Tact has always used Apple’s default typography. We thought we’d elevate the Tact experience by letting you switch between three distinct typographic styles. All styles still use the Apple system typography, but apply the distinct design that you choose.

Zürich plays homage to Switzerland’s influence in sans serif type design that has greatly informed the typography on Apple platforms, and remains the default. Praha has a more academic, almost book-like feel. Billund offers a playful alternative that’s quite similar to Zürich, but a bit more quirky.

You can change your typography preference in the new “Tweaks” section of Tact settings on both macOS and iOS. This preference is stored per device and currently not synced, so you can use a different style on each device if you so wish.

Content and scrolling improvements

Entering and moving around in Tact chats sometimes felt chaotic, as some content vertically resized and caused other content to shift around, especially in chats with lots of web links shared. Fixing this is not entirely done, but in this version, there is much less chaos.

A big contributor to the jerkiness were previews of web content, that first displayed a placeholder, and then changed height as the final web preview content was loaded. In this version, both the placeholder and web preview components have fixed heights, so there is much less shifting.

No archived chats in iOS “Share” component

A good problem to have is if you have too many chats in Tact. Until now, all of them would be shown in iOS “Share” extension experience when you share a web link, file, or picture from any other app. It was easy to pick the wrong chat to share to, if two chats had similar names.

It makes sense for the Share experience to only show your ongoing chats. Archived chats remain usable in Tact app, but should not show up in other places like Share. In this version, “Share to Tact” on iOS only shows your ongoing chats, making the chat list shorter, and errors hopefully less likely to happen.