Monday, June 30, 2008

Sinhala Font and Keyboard for Testing

Thanks to Nick Shanks, there is now an OS X Sinhala font available for testing here. A first stab at a "wijeyasekara" keyboard layout for this script can be had on my iDisk.

I'm sure the keyboard has errors, so I would be grateful for any users willing to test it and report them to me for correction.

Monday, June 9, 2008

iPhone 3G Expands Language Capabilities

According to its tech specs, Apple's iPhone 3G, which was announced June 9 and should be available July 11, has language support for English, French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Russian, and Polish.

International keyboard and dictionary support is available for English (U.S.), English (UK), French (France), French (Canada), German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese (Portugal), Portuguese (Brazil), Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Korean (no dictionary), Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Russian, and Polish.

I understand that a software upgrade for the iPod Touch will be available in July to give it the same language features.

From reports I have received, fonts are now present for a number of additional languages, but the software is still not capable of correct display of complex scripts like Arabic, Devanagari, Tamil, and Tibetan which can be handled by the full OS X without problem.