Monday, June 10, 2013

New Language Features in OS X 10.9 Mavericks and iOS 7

There seem to be only a couple new language features in OS X 10.9 and iOS 7 as announced June 10, 2013.  Thanks to blog readers I have so far

1) new French and German voices for SIRI, with more languages promised for later

2) Chinese-English, Italian, Dutch, and Korean reference dictionaries

3) Settings for Tencent Weibo microblogging for Chinese users and multi-character handwriting recognition

4) a possible Tamil keyboard in iOS 7 (OS X has had one for quite a while already).

If you spot any others, let me know.

4 comments:

paul bennett said...

Siri gets French and German voices (and more were promised over time).

One slide mentioned a Chinese-English dictionary, (on the same slide as they mentioned the addition of Tencent Weibo (in addition to the existing Sina Weibo) for Simplified Chinese users.

I was hoping for RTL/Bi-Di layout for Arabic & Hebrew or maybe more languages, but there was no announcement...

Tom Gewecke said...

Thanks, Paul! RTL is only a problem with iWork and iBooks Author, the OS otherwise does that OK.

paul bennett said...

Another update: I was able to get a brief hands-on of the iOS 7 build released at WWDC, and while they have not added any new languages, they have added two new variants to existing languages:

iOS 6: English and British English
iOS 7: English, British English, and Australian English

iOS 6: Spanish
iOS 7: Spanish and "es-MX" (Spanish for Mexico)

That brings the total number of UI language options under Settings->International->Languages from 34 to 36.

Kuroneko said...

They also added a handful of Japanese fonts including the famous Yumin and Yu-gothic.