Global by Design

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 menu)  then you [...]

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The Kindle has gone international, sort of.
That is, Amazon is launching a new Kindle outfitted with a radio chip that works in most of the world’s cellular markets (100+) — as opposed to the US-only Kindle, which operates only on Sprint’s network.
Unfortunately, just because someone in, say, Russia will be able to download a book, [...]

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Via Blogos, I was fascinated to read that the new Mac Snow Leopard OS features a Chinese input method editor (IME) that allows users to input characters via track pad.
Here’s a video of it in action (with some rather odd musical accompaniment):

What’s particularly interesting is that this IME began on the iPhone.
Here is a screen [...]

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My previous post on Twitter got me thinking about what other companies had registered language-specific domains for their Twitter accounts.
Turns out, most companies haven’t even registered Twitter accounts for their primary brands.
Like who?
Apple, for one.
Here we have someone who apparently likes apples but isn’t Apple:

It appear that Microsoft reserved its account early on, though nothing [...]

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The Netherlands, a country with just 16 million people, accounts for more than 3 million ccTLDs.
That’s an impressive ratio of people to domains — one ccTLD per 5.3 people — and it the highest ratio of any country with more than five million residents.
Germany comes in a close second, with a ratio of roughly one [...]

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About six months ago, I began toying with the idea of biking to work. Driving from Seattle to Redmond is a minor nightmare because of traffic over the bridge. And I know there are people who bike all the time, so I figured I could do the same.
Big mistake.
On a Saturday afternoon one November, I [...]

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Does this icon say “language” to you?
It doesn’t to me.
But the OMC design studio feels so strongly about it that it has launched a web site to promote this icon as a global standard.
I applaud the effort and I fully agree that there is a need for such an icon, but I don’t believe that [...]

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I’m not very patient with games. Which is probably why I’m not very good.
My brother has concocted a tile puzzle game for the iPhone, shown below, that I still haven’t figured out — even at the easiest setting.
Maybe you’ll have better luck than I’ve had. The good news is that Chris has made it available [...]

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So after a slow start upgrading to the iPhone 2.0 OS on Friday, I’ve since had a chance to review a number of the apps and have been very impressed so far (though a few did cause the iPhone to crash).
As I reviewed the Apps in the iTunes store I began to notice that they [...]

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Apple seems to have made a mess of its new iPhone rollout.
I have the old iPhone and tried to upgrade this morning. Apparently I’m one of many thousands of people (or more) who have received nothing but error messages. Here is one of them:

Apple had to know the strain to its servers would be [...]

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