SF Symbols Reference 4+

Thank you for making this

I need to be able to browse Apple’s catalog without having to go to my computer. Your app does the job perfectly. Thank you :)

Why does this happen‽

Hi, I gave this app 1 of 5 stars because of a problem that i have with the symbols. I was so excited to try out everything i saw on the app so i can copy and paste and do cool tricks to show my friends. But when i actually tried to copy and paste, it showed the ? In a box thing, i tried so many other symbols, even the ones that should work like the + symbol, and nothing. If there is an update i need to get or something like that, please let me know so i can rank this app with 5 stars. I am on a iPad 11 pro.

It depends on your use case

The recent update includes the complete list of symbols in each category, so I raised my rating for it to 3 stars. I didn't rate it higher because of the serious lack of usefulness for sharing the symbols — they can't be seen on iOS. Apparently, this is a limitation of iOS, but knowing it's Apple's fault doesn't make the app any better. If all you want is to browse the symbols and get their names, this app will let you do that.

Developer Response ,

UPDATE.

Thanks for the detailed explanation. It helped me a lot.

There was 12 and 2 symbols missing from Devices and Human categories respectively. Version 1.1.1 (3) fixes that.

Unfortunately, custom fonts installation doesn’t affect how the symbols are rendered across the system. Using NSTextAttachment doesn’t help that too. It looks like a deadend. As for notifying a user about that tricky behavior, it will be implemented later.

ORIGINAL RESPONSE.

The app does include all 1679 of the Apple’s SF Symbols.
To look at them tap “All”. My suggestion is that you tried to find the symbol in the category it doesn’t belong to (e.g. “pencil” in “Nature”). Note also that unlike the official macOS app, this one searches *within* a selected category.

Copying and pasting the symbols works as well.
What you might have found surprising is that after you paste a previously copied symbol there is a weird-looking “􀃬” instead. However, it contains valid data. You can check that by copying a symbol in my app and then pasting it in your mac (assuming the pasteboard is shared across the devices, and the macOS “SF Symbols” app is installed). The expected symbol will appear. The problem is that an operating system needs the SF Fonts to be installed to render the symbols inside the strings. The only solution, which came to my mind, is a system-wide font installation using the new API but it doesn’t seem feasible due to the license restrictions.

What did you mean by quick looking with Shortcuts? I haven’t added any kind of support of the Shortcuts app, Siri Shortcuts or Quick Look.

Anyway, thank you for the review. Please tell me whether I understand your usage scenarios correctly.