Global by Design

The iPhone is a global success story. And one of the reasons for this success can be attributed to the device’s support for more than 30 languages. But with the iPhone 4 update, Apple continues to push ahead on the global front. Multilingual Mac has documented these improvements, which include fonts that now display some Indic [...]

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While trying (and failing) to buy an iPhone this morning, I’ve encountered three different error screens. Here’s my favorite: I seriously doubt that “Oops!” has been localized for different markets. In fact, many companies overlook the localization of error messages. For starters, doing so is no trivial task — as many of these error messages [...]

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The WSJ has an article about iPhone developers taking their apps global. It’s very early days, but it’s safe to say that localization vendors are drooling over the possibilities. Although many apps aren’t going to present much in the way of translation revenue, the localization engineering work can be quite substantial. I’m currently aware of [...]

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I realize I’m a bit obsessed with country codes. It’s a sickness, I know. After I created the Country Codes of the World map, I began looking at other platforms for the design. And since I own an iPhone, I couldn’t resist creating a custom wallpaper for it. Here are two ccTLD wallpapers for the [...]

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I recently got around to upgrading to Snow Leopard. Along the way, I discovered a rather interesting bug. It’s not a huge deal, but a bug nonetheless. And one likely to cause a fair amount of confusion. First of all, if you have never modified your language settings (The “International” button on the System Preferences [...]

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