OS X and Region

[kurisu]

I'm sure there are people there with the same problem. I am now running Enghish version of OS 9.1 and am living in Japan. From what I read on these forums I can just buy the Japanese version of OS X and have no problem changing it into English. Does this mean everything? (help, documentations, etc...?)

Also, is there any problem installing OS X on top of a different language OS 9.1? Specifically, I want to install a Japanese version of OS X on top of and English version of OS 9.1. Thanks, any info would help a lot.

[Pascal]

The CD you will buy in Japan will be similar, content-wise, to the one I will buy here in Québec (Canada) and the ones that will be on sale in Cupertino. That means that everything, including the help files will be available in the language of your choice. (My feeling is that the help content will be fetched as needed from the Apple site, over the Internet.)

Similarly, since the OS will be the same all over the world, it should work with an OS 9 in the language of your choice. Then again, since OS 9.1 will be on the CD, maybe it will be an English-only OS 9... Does anyone else have any more info on this ?

[AdmiralAK]

As far as OS 9.1 (for classic support) is concerned I think that the English international cersion will be used.

As far as OS X is concerned I think the OS and the bundled apps have been build with internationalization in mind. As jobs said "Once world, One CD". So you can just go inthe control panels and change your language to japanese ( a language that I want to learn one day :-p), italiano, Deutsch, greek, fran�ais, espa–ol, or whatever (I really hope greek is supported :-) )

I think that the applications in OS X have some sort of property that allows them to change their manus to another language *if* they were programmed to have another language.
This means that if I, a coder from the USA, make a small program for OS X, I know greek, english and french lets say. So I code my program and I write the three menu styles (for lack of a better word). If one goes and changes his system to french instead of "file" he will see "fichier", etc.

If someone is changes the system language to german or any other language that my program does not support the menus are going to default to the default language which is english.


This is how I understand it and how I have seen OS X behave :-)


Admiral

[kurisu]

Thanks for the info. It's very helpful. Also I tried to talk directly with Apple USA and they were no help at all and said that they won't be able to help with anything like that (Not even answers to questions) until it ships. I then called Apple Japan and they were a huge help. They said that I can change everything to English or my preferred language with no problem and with classic, I can use my current OS9.1 or the Japanese OS9.1 that comes with OSX. My choice, either way no problems at all. So great service from Apple Japan!

[monty]

Originally posted by AdmiralAK
This is how I understand it and how I have seen OS X behave :-)

Yep, apple's developer docs also say that there are firms who will translate your program for you. So the programmer doesn't have to know 6 languages. As long as the app is well writen, it could easily be localised for as many languages as OS X will support. This will all make OS X the most international OS around. I've looked at the developer docs and they say that basically if an application requests a resource say pict.tiff, the system will first look for the file in separate language folders in the order that the user has specified in the system preferences and failing that just show it in the programmers language. All these masses of folders and files are happily contained in the application's bundle so it appears as a single file. So grab this single bundle/file, take it to another machine with different prefs, and it could appear in another language. This is vastly different from the standard way of shipping a different version for each language.

I was really surprised the first time it turned my machine into a german machine.

peter

[AdmiralAK]

LOL.. I turned it to french first :-p (since I cant undertand german that much yet )....

seeing that I like localization this wil make my job easier when I graduate LOL :-p


Admiral

[Pascal]

Read yesterday (March 9th) on macplus.net :

"The Mac OS X box will contain two CDs : the Mac OS X CD (multilingual by design) and the localised OS 9.1 appropriate for the country where the OS X system is sold."

This means that everone will get the same OS X CD, but the accompanying OS 9 CD will not be the same, depending if you buy OS X in Japan, France, Germany, the United States...

(By extension, this also means that you can use OS X with whatever OS 9.1 you fancy...)

[AdmiralAK]

lol... think abou it....
have my OS in english when I am using it,
in german when my mother & brother visit (LOL so they cant understand) and in french or italian when my girlfriend visits .... soo... no one knows what the heck is going on except me! ... isnt technology great ????


I cant wait till OS X hits the stores!


Admiral