Thursday, January 14, 2016

New Keyboard Resource for OS X

Keyman, which has long helped Windows users add special keyboards to their machines, is now available in a beta version for Mac.  The app required for users to make custom keyboards themselves is still only for Windows, but the OS X version of Keyman Desktop lets you download a large number of keyboards from the existing Keyman and SIL libraries.

Monday, January 11, 2016

Apple Watch Language Capabilities


The Apple Watch uses a version of OS X (watchOS) which has different language capabilities than Mac OS X or iOS. Localizations for the menus and dialogues (set using the iPhone Apple Watch app via the menu My Watch > General > Language) are English (U.S.), English (UK), English (Australia), English (India), Spanish (Mexico), Spanish (Spain), French (France), French (Canada), German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Traditional, Hong Kong), Portuguese (Portugal), Portuguese (Brazil), Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, Thai, Turkish, Finnish, Indonesian, Norwegian, Polish, Arabic, Czech, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Malay, and Vietnamese.

Languages available for dictation, Siri, and Smart Replies may be somewhat different.

This page provides instructions on how to adjust the dictation language of the Watch.

This article provides some info on how watchOS features have evolved.

(Note:  I don't have a Watch and Apple's published info is only fragmentary.  Comments and additional info from readers is welcome)

Wednesday, January 6, 2016

iOS 9 Hardware Keyboard Layouts


When using a hardware keyboard with the iOS 9 device, you need to go into Settings > General > Keyboard > Hardware Keyboards and match the layout with whatever your keyboard's key printing is.  Unfortunately Apple supplies only a limited selection of such layouts, so it's possible an exact match may not be possible.  For example, if your keyboard requires the British PC layout, you are out of luck.   I think only one normal iOS keyboard has no hardware layout at all:  Tamil.  


As far as I know, 3rd party keyboards do not include hardware layouts.