Category Archives: Apple

Country code wallpaper for your iPhone

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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 iPhone.

iPhone ccTLD wallpaper, version 1

If you’d like to use one, simply save the image to your desktop and then import it to your iPhone via iPhoto or your PC images folder.

iPhone ccTLD wallpaper

I’m using the black background currently.

I’m also working on a wallpaper for laptops and desktops. I’ll keep you posted…

Mac Snow Leopard International Bug

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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 menu)  then you won’t hit this bug.

If, however, you have made some changes to your language settings, read on…

Here is what my International settings menu looked like before the upgrade:

You’ll notice that I have U.S. English at the top of the list, followed by Japanese, followed by a “neutral” English. Normally, U.S. English would be followed by neutral English, which is the source of the bug.

When I began upgrading to Snow Leopard, I was presented with the usual legalese page — except that this one was in Japanese:

Apparently, Apple ignored my U.S. English setting and figured I had my computer set up for Japanese, hence the Japanese text.

To fix this, I simply bumped up the neutral English language setting ahead of Japanese.

NOTE: The same bug will appear if you have British English at the top of the list followed by a language other than English.

UPDATE: This bug may also impact the results of Spotlight as well. That is, you could see results in Japanese mixed with English. I haven’t been able to repro it myself but have encountered a few blog posts related to this issue.

Kindle goes international, but not multilingual

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kindle_intl

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, doesn’t mean that the book itself will display Cyrillic characters.

You see, even though the Kindle may operate in much of the world, it is still a Latin-only device.

I learned this the hard way when I helped adapt Forgetting English for the Kindle. For example, in the short story First Sunday the Tongan line “Pou’li ā, Sione” came out as “Pou’li a, Sione” — minus the ā.

That’s because “ā” and many other extended Latin characters won’t display properly. Needless to say, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, and Japanese aren’t going to have much luck either. Based on my parsing the sparse documentation on the Amazon site, I understand the issue isn’t a lack of Unicode support but a lack of font support.

Apparently you can use this Unicode hack to get your Kindle to display non-Latin characters, but this is hardly a mainstream solution. People shouldn’t have to download their own fonts to display the books they want to read. Basic font support in an e-reader is, well, something you would expect to find installed by default.

I’ve since come across a number of people who develop books for the Kindle who aren’t exactly happy about the situation.

Why doesn’t Amazon include a Unicode-friendly font on its device? Perhaps this was by design, to save on memory. After all, a Unicode font can easily weigh more than several MB, which takes away from precious book storage space.

My opinion is this: Amazon didn’t design globallay from day one. And that’s a shame for readers and writers alike. When you compare the Kindle with the iPhone, which supports more than 30 languages, I can only say that I’m looking forward to the coming of the iTablet.