Category Archives: Unicode

Unicode (used creatively) makes your Tweets go further

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I’m not exactly a power-Tweeter, so I can’t say I have the need for a tool that stretches Twitter’s 140-character limit.

Still, I get a kick out of Maxitweet.

To understand what it does, here’s an example.

I entered the following text: 149 characters.

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago–never mind how long precisely–having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore

And Maxtweet squeezed it down to 136 characters:

Caǁ me ʪhmael．Some years ago–never m㏌d how▕ong precێely–hav㏌gl计ᅱe or no money ㏌ my purse，and noth㏌g particular to interest me onshore

Those funny looking characters interspersed are pulled from Unicode’s wide pallet — such as ێ (ARABIC LETTER YEH WITH SMALL V). This character was used in place of “is.”

Other substitute characters used include “计”, “ʪ”, “㏌”, and “．” (I hope they all appear on your browser. Note that this blog is in Unicode but you may not have the right fond needed to display the characters)

Normally when I see this type of character substitution I think of phishers creating bogus domain names. But for once this traditionally nefarious technique has found a recreational application.

Here’s how the Tweet came across on on my iPhone:

maxtweet_twitter

Go Unicode!

Type Russian without the keyboard

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There are shortcuts on most English keyboards for entering characters such as á and é.

But I can never seem to remember what those shortcuts are.

Fortunately, there is TypeIt, an online editor that gives you the ability to input non-ASCII characters used by languages such as Spanish, Hungarian, and Russian. Here’s a screen shot:

typeit-danish

Operating systems like OSX and Windows also give you the ability to change your keyboard virtually — but that can be a real pain if you only need to input an á.

Tomasz Szynalski launched TypeIt in 2004, and the site gets about 35,000 visits a month. Some people use the editor like I do — to crank out a few characters — while others use it to write entire letters. Russian is the latest keyboard added — and I hope to see more to come.

The site is www.typeit.org.

The Localization of iPhone

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So I gave in to my inner geek and purchased an iPhone.

One of the things I first noticed (and love) about the Web browser is the .com button on the keypad, shown here.

iPhone keypad

Of course, this little shortcut isn’t so handy if I want to visit a .org or .edu Web site.

It’s also not much use for visiting country-specific Web sites, such as www.yahoo.fr.

Which is why the localization of this interface is going to be an interesting thing to watch evolve.

It is just a matter of time before we see the iPhone launched around the world. So does that mean the .com key will be replaced by .de or .fr keys? I imagine so.

This will give companies yet another good reason to register country code domains. While a Web user in France may first go to acme.com and then navigate to acme.fr when visiting a Web site. Using the iPhone, it’s likely that person will simply go to acme.fr, an example of a new interface changing user behavior.

The other interesting thing I’ve noticed on the iPhone so far is that it doesn’t appear to be using a “conventional” Unicode font. That is, I’m finding that the interface displays Chinese and other Asian scripts just fine — as well as Cyrillic — but it can’t display Arabic or Hebrew scripts. What this says to me is that Apple doesn’t have the Middle East on its near-term global expansion plans. My guess is that it’s using the scaled-down font to conserve drive space. Documentation is hard to come by so far so I’d love to hear from anyone out there who knows more about this.

I’ve been to Europe once so far and the iPhone held up quite nicely; AT&T didn’t hit me up for too much in roaming fees. It is interesting — though not surprising — that you can’t de-activate cellular roaming and just rely on Wi-Fi. I did have a faulty power adapter but got that replaced at the Apple store with no resistance.

But back to the Web browser. I know this has been said many times before, but this is the first phone that makes browsing the Web about as easy as it is on a computer. And I suspect that over time this will have an impact not only on how companies develop Web sites in the US, but how they localize these sites for markets around the world.

Microsoft Vista Upgrades to Unicode 5.0

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Microsoft has played a major role helping to establish Unicode as a global standard.

Microsoft first migrated to Unicode for its Windows 2000 operating system. In doing so, it cleared the way for faster development of global software. It also allows users to more easily share documents that includes multiple languages and scripts.

This Microsoft article details why Microsoft upgraded to the latest version of Unicode for Vista, coming to a computer near you, and how this will benefit developers. In short, the benefits of doing so include the ability to support a few more languages, enhance security and collation, and support internationalized domain names (something I’ll be writing more about in months ahead).

It’s nice to see Microsoft upgrading to 5.0, as this will prod other software makers to do the same, although most no longer need much prodding.