by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/12/13 10:16 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/12/13/6689013.aspx
I am not talking about going blind or hair on your palms, either. I'm talking about internationalization issues. Get your mind out of the gutter!
It started when I realized I hadn't played with my gadgets for a while.
I decided to see what was in the gallery....
Mostly pretty run of the mill, looks like.
Okay, who can we check out for good internationalization issues?
I know, the Stocks Gadget!
Let's drag that out and see what we have:
Okay, that's cute.
Let's go over to Regional and Language Options, in the Location tab:
Doesn't this seem like the kind of thing one would expect to fall under the hearing of Some software and services provide you with local information such as news and weather ?
Let's change it to France.
It's where my brother-in-law's brother's wife comes from. Let's see how the stocks are doing there.
I have already been told the old instance (which I could have customized) will not change, I have to drag a new one out with the updated settings.
Here goes....
Ummm.
Oh, I forgot -- no one uses the GEOID.
Let's change the default user locale, instead:
I'm not blaming the French on the GEOID issue, so we'll try them again and drag out a new instance:
Cool!
How about German?
Cool again!
And Japan?
Wow, very cool.
Okay, we have to try UK English given our poor track record considering all EN's to be treated the same:
Outstanding!
Okay, I will truncate the next bit since my attempts to trying a bunch of other locales like the ones in India didn't get me much -- despite the presence of stock exchanges in Bangalore, Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, and Madras -- not to mention the National Stock Exchange of India, and the rest of the ones in India (22 in all, I believe?).
Plus a bunch of other locales....
Though on the plus side, one cool feature is that you can keep each instance open:
Of course notice how the user's preferred regional settings are not respected -- so unless you are familiar with a particular locale's preferences, reading the information can be something of a challenge.
So really if they could just add in some more data on the other tons of stock exchanges around the world and make it based on location (the default user locale change has an unfortunate side effect of adding a keyboard layout each time you change it, which really does increase the pain-in-the-ass factor of them using the wrong setting) then this would a cool little gadget to have, all over the world!
Definite room for improvement here in future versions; I'll start talking to folks today....
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Ambarish Sridharanarayanan on 13 Dec 2007 6:39 PM:
Oh, this is just completely wrong. I live in the US but want my UI etc. in Indian English, so I set my location to US but my locale to English (India). Any app that presumes I live in India is b0rken.
Michael S. Kaplan on 13 Dec 2007 7:24 PM:
Isn't that what I'm saying in the post? :-)
They are using the wrong setting.
Pavanaja UB on 14 Dec 2007 1:00 AM:
It is not only the software gadgets, the real-life hardware gadgets like Windows Mobile devices, Palm, Zune, iPhone, iPod, Creative devices, etc, all of them do not support Indic.
-Pavanaja
Michael S. Kaplan on 14 Dec 2007 2:43 AM:
Actually, if you build the mobile device with Platform Builder and include the Uniscribe component, a whole bunch of Indic will work quite well.... I've seen it!
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