Localisation¶
209 words on Software
The issue of text encoding keeps following us around these days. If you’re only using the English parts of the web or computers you may remain blissfully unaware of that. But even if you’re wanting things as simple as umlauts the problems start appearing quickly. Two examples I recently ran into follow. The first is from Services menu entries provided by RealPlayer:
And the second was in the BatteryInfo Dashboard widget which I recently tried out:
And those problems puzzle me. How comes that Real hire people who don’t know how to write a properly encoded .strings file for the Mac? Shouldn’t these technical details be handled correctly by default? And while I’d be more lenient for the widget which is made by amateurs, I still wonder how they didn’t catch that problem. There are just a dozen of strings in the widget and testing each of them once would take two disjoint minutes, suggesting that they weren’t tested at all. Sure, the little widget does support many languages and JavaScript seems to use UTF-8 encoding for characters rather than UTF-16, but what are all those localisations worth if they aren’t tested? I guess they won’t teach the widget’s creators that even tiny localisations are a lot of work…
