On IT and beyond

I’m now blogging using w.bloggar. Recommended tool of choice and in contrast to MovablePoster fully 8-bit savy

http://del.icio.us/help/firefox/extension

Very useful. How long will it take until Flock will be obsolete?

Preface

In this essay, speaking of “software” means desktop software. Of course, the current Web 2.0 hysteria seems to make traditional software so out-of-date but there still is and will be a need for software that runs offline, at least temporarily.

I wouldn’t have seen the need for this essay if there wasn’t an issue. I still encounter software that is not 8-bit savy. That said, let’s go international.

Going international 

Who did you have in mind when you started developing software? Only english-speaking customers or a truly international audience? Do you plan to release localized versions? You think you’re done after translating it? Nope.

One of the greatest challenges in developing software is providing a truly globally useful software. While this problem goes way beyond the scope I want to talk about here I want to specifically address the very basics: Text display. Even if your software is in english only, others might find it useful enough to use it, entering data in their own language. Go over the big pond, to Europe. Ever tried to enter Umlauts like ä,ö,ü,ß or accented letters like á? Do they show up correctly? What happens when you select words like “hauptsächlich”? Are complete words selected or are the words broken where an Umlaut starts? What about sorting? Do Umlauts sort correctly? Do you publish correctly to the clipboard?

Problems get worse if you happen to develop cross platform, especially Mac and Windows. Does text entered on Windows show up correctly on the Mac? Is all output correctly formatted, also the line endings? I ever so often see texts that have a double line spacing because carriage return and line feed are interpreted as two line feeds.
You feel confident about Europe? Then go East! As soon as you are in China or Japan you might encounter even more complicated character encodings. Then it’s time to think about Unicode. Some users might have the idea to name their files in Kanji. Some users might have files which were created in Spain, using filenames with 8-bit characters that display rather weird on a Chinese system. So there are definitely some challenges ahead of you. In the end only a Unicode-based solution will keep your users from tossing away your application.
Imagine you were actually using your own software (OK, that’s enough stuff for another essay on eating your own dogfood) and you can actually use it but some characters you entered are simply omitted or misspelled or used to reformat the output. You’d kick the application, wouldn’t you? So while it’s no big deal using a foreign language application for many non-english speaking people it’s definitely a no-no to mistreat characters beyond the oh-so-easily-manageable 7-bit character set.

I’m reading weblogs now for the better part of 3 years and I’m blogging myself for even longer. Reading all the A-list blogs plus some more obscure ones is not only interesting and inspiring but sometimes also annoying. Seeing the internet as a truly global medium I very often wonder how limited the discussion is to basically english speaking countries, specifically the US. While this is definitely one of the most important markets and technological adaptation, broadband availability and VC culture are all in favor of US-based and US-focused operations I’m missing sometimes the relation to region like Europe, Asia, not to speak from other regions like South America or Africa.

In my opinion, understanding they way software is used in non-US countries is key for a truly global success. Obviously, the opposite is true for European software developers: The US market sometimes seems to be very different. Be aware of that and beware – the guys over there are quick.