‘Underscore’ David Smith:
First, the back story. During the introduction of iOS 7 one of the random side effects of the wide reaching changes to the iOS user interface was that app icon badges started to get truncated whenever they got above 4 digits long.
At first, I thought I’d have to remove the feature in iOS 7, until one fateful afternoon (while taking a shower, of course) I had the insight that I might be able to work around this. My realization was that the numbers were getting truncated based on their displayed width and not their digit count. Thus a number with a lot of 1s in it would not get truncated because the 1s are so thin, whereas a number with a lot of 4s in it would be truncated because they render much wider.
Cool little hack. There’s something comforting about knowing that even the most experienced developers sometimes use hacks like these to get their work done!