Languages Support
It's probably getting old reading about my honeymoon with the PowerBook and my reacquaintance trials and tribulations with MacOS, but I started this blog to write about stuff that I felt like writing about... you can always tune out... so I'm going to not worry about being overly single-minded in these entries.
Today's topic is support for non-English languages. Specifically, the absolute ease with which everything just works right out of the box on the Mac. I probably made only one or two adjustments to settings to get Chinese (Simplified and Traditional) and Japanese language input working. Having done this on the Windows side, I will say that it's not too much harder there, except that so many applications just don't support foreign languages.
The last time I had a Mac, they were still pioneers of foreign language input. I remember buying a product called the Chinese Language Kit to do my Chinese homework with. That was awesome at the time. Now, it's all part of the OS that comes with the machine, and the integration is far tighter. My hard drive is named "あまの愛" and foreign text can stand side by side with latin text with no problems just about anywhere. The one single exception to this was the Internet Preferences panel, which wouldn't save my default save location unless I renamed the drive using latin characters. Once I got it to save the location, though, I was able to change the name of the drive back and things still worked.
But the thing I'm really impressed with is that my foreign language songs automatically appear in their foreign language titles when I put in the CD and iTunes grabs the data from freedb. It's a thing of beauty. I was never able to get this to work on a multitude of CD rippers and mp3 players in Windows. Granted, I didn't try all that hard, but I was quite impressed when it just plain worked on the Mac... surprised even.
I should be getting Microsoft Office v.X tomorrow or Monday, so I'll be able to try out some more complicated things with language input at that point. So far, though, I am quite satisfied.
Comments
My kids were absolutely floored when I told them they could do their Japanese homework on the iMac and it wouldn't take any new software. Then I showed them, and now we have kanji-titled folders and documents all over the hard drive.
I have to say, it's pretty darn cool looking at the login screen with a list of users in a variety of languages. Or typing 'ls' in a terminal and not seeing a bunch of control codes…
Posted by: swansong | June 13, 2003 10:10 AM
Okay, the coolest thing just happened. I just observed that the iPod, in fact, displays my foreign language songs correctly!
Posted by: jet | June 16, 2003 2:36 PM