Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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Currencies

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Icon for International System Preferences Something to be filed under computer oddities: On your Mac, go to The International System preference and look at the different currencies that are offered in the ‘Formats’ tab there. It’s an amazingly long list containing many currencies you’ve never heard about and that probably aren’t used anymore:

Some currencies offered by the Mac OS

Now it may be nice to be able to use a number of European currency units (€, XBA, XBC, XBD) or the Finn-Mark (1860-1962, aka FIN) or possibly any other currency listed in ISO 4217. But does it make sense or even a good UI? I doubt it.

I’d rather say that fewer currencies which actually exist these days and are used in the real world should be there exclusively as people who have a reason to use historical or stock-exchange only currencies as their system default will be very few – if at all existant – and well aware of their three letter codes. On the other hand, now the list is really long and confusing for everybody else. And – bad UI – its autocompletion on typing is case sensitive. Which for a list like this one, with basically fixed contents and rare usage, just doesn’t make sense. (In contrast, look at iTunes, where the case-insensitivity of the artist name autocompletion can be a bit bothersome at times as often the data you get from IMDB seems to have been entered by illiterates.)

October 11, 2005, 0:11

Tagged as Mac OS X.

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