Pre user localizes webOS in Chinese 18
Fri, 11 Sep 2009 11:25 am EDT
Sure, webOS has basic Chinese character support, but as any Chinese speaker will tell you, it’s pretty darned basic. Not to be deterred by such things, Brunic set out to localize his Pre in Chinese (localization changes the user interface language, as well as number and date/time formatting). And, well, you see the results above. Apparently the process was a mostly manual one, though Brunic estimates that he was able to switch about 99% of the UI to Chinese, which is no small feat. Hopefully soon we won't have to worry about users localizing the Pre themselves, with this big international roll-out coming up (with a possibility of China getting in on the action). Swing on over to Brunic’s blog to read how it was done, assuming you can cut through the garbled Google translation.
18 Comments
I think this is an amazing accomplishment. But not really the language I want. Get some Japanese support PALM! I've considered building an app for the social network site mixi with is a pure Japanese site. But without Japanese input on the Pre, the app doesn't hold much weight as it might.
I'm still waiting months later for that guy that claimed he got Hebrew working on the Pre. That guy still won't release a single bit of information about it. :(
today chinese people everywhere rejoiced
we need Chinese IME!!!
As much as I am rejoicing for the Chinese I have to ask, Slow news day?
Yeah, I was thinking that too. Congrats to that guy for all his good work, but c'mon.
I think it is a pertinent piece of news as it shows the potential and capabilities of WebOS. That sort of thing is why I keep coming back to this site. Not that chinese would do me a lick of good personally, but it may mean that others will benefit.
It shows that more character sets than just ISO-8859-1 are natively supported on the Pre already, which is good news to those of us wishing for support for more languages. I would like Polish support, but the Pre currently provides no way to enter the characters:
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
The only Polish diacritic that is supported is:
Any chance for a right-to-left languages localization..
meaning, reading\writing Hebrew\Persian support..?
someone in the forums claimed to have hebrew working and very believable screenshots of it. He said over a month ago that he would not give anymore information about it for now. I'm kinda surprised that he's just keeping it to himself. :(
IMHO, physical keyboards create a big impediment to being able to internationalize the device. Internationalizing an iPhone (for example) is done entirely through software.
What this makes me curious about is how do people enter text/data into the above Pre? As single language American, it's not a problem I've had to encounter personally.
I don't know anything about how the Chinese computer keyboard look like but you can define (for every device language) which characters will be available when you press sym + key. I think that the Chinese text entry may have been done this way.
Klingon, anyone?
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This is great and why Palm user community is the best. I hope Palm can have better language support. I am already very impressed, but can't wait for the 1.2 update, get $50 back and getting more Apps.
I don't think the WebView widget even supports Content-Encoding!
There is system called pinyin Chinese people use. The same western alphabet is used to type the phonetic pronunciation of the words and you choose from about 10 characters and that's it. I can perfectly input Chinese characters from my "normal" keyboard by using a little software called Sougou but there are thousands of different ones people use.
I would like to use my Pre to text friends in China, but I am now aware of a Pinyin IME for WebOS. Perhaps because the Pre does not appear to be available in China. I would however, love to be able to not only use Chinese in SMS messages, but store notes, read and write emails in Simplified Chinese using a Pinyin entry system.
I am also having to carry my old Palm XT around with me because it has the best Chinese/English dictionary I have come across (from Pleco Software), but they are concerned that the touch sensitive screen is not suitable for directly entering/recogning Chinese character without a stylus. However, they have something similar on the iPhone. Come on Palm - don't let me down, you have been best of bred in my books for years.