AmigaWorld.net’s 14th Q&A Session with Fleecy Moss has been posted. In response to one of the ten asked questions Amiga’s CTO specified twenty languages which will be supported by AmigaOS4. In addition the Russian localisation is still uncertain, but will likely be ready in time for release as well.
Yes … this is very great :o)
Looking forward to get AmigaOS4.0 :o)
i hope they will support “Right To Left” languages.
As “mainstream” systems mostly support one language only by default some people may wonder how AmigaOS handles this.
For over a decade AmigaOS includes a Locale preference utitity with which the OS language and preferred software language(s) can be specified and changed on the fly.
For AmigaOS4.0 at least 20 languages will be supported by default, but if support for another language is not yet included, 3rd parties can easily create and add any (left-to-right reading) language and many 3rd party Amiga applications support such functionality as well.
any chances of the interface of AmigaOS being in a language other than English, or is that already included?
At one time an Israeli company (Harmonysoft) sold an Amiga word processor (Rashumon) that handled Hebrew and Arabic.
It could perhaps be revived.
Support for Right-to-Left writing systems, and for Chinese, Korean and Japanese, is obviously urgently needed for AmigaOS. The other OSes already have them.
The Workbench can easily be set to any of the main European languages – as Mike said, this has been true for a long time.
Individual programs may or may not have a catalog in the language you want. Some simple or unfinished programs are not localised, but almost all serious programs have catalogs. Users wanting a less common language often write their own catalogs, and there is a volunteer Amiga Translators Organisation.
The point of a catalog is to hold all strings in files outside the main program file.
I don’t see support for Japanese or any other multi-byte language. That renders Amiga completely useless to me. Oh well, perhaps someday in the future.
heh. id rather see money spen ton a chinese+japanese set than irish? how many irish gaelic speakers are there in the world? who is going to write apps with gaelic translations??
a chinese/japanese language would open up a bigger market than a irish translation….
just a shame imo.
reading that interview is a bit of an eye opener on the internal limitations of os4… (and someone had the gall to as k about a 64bit implementation…. i guess it doesnt hurt to ask…)
> I don’t see support for Japanese
That’s just regarding internal OS support, 3rd party applications can still support Japanese. You don’t seem to have a problem with reading English though (regarding the completely useless part)…
Luckily there’s a relative strong Amiga community presence in Japan (compared to US, not Europe) and thus there are a few handy Japanese languaged Amiga software titles available:
Some handy free programs available on Aminet:
– jmore03.lzh (Japanese text reader, but note that you need to install a Japanese font)
– Japanese.lha (Patch that enables japanese text to be shown by ANY program)
– jkff074.lha (Allows AmigaOS’s default webbrowser IBrowse to display Japanese fonts)
– JiwaPro.lha (Japanese text editor)
– jali.lha (Japanese interface for AmiIRC)
http://www.aminet.net
Quote from the article:
“Most text handling and output functions in OS4 are not able to write from right to left, so there still exist large problems with arabic/persian and hebrew, an application that reverses arabic and hebrew strings before output can at least display its GUI but for text input (cursor on the right after return) special applications would be needed.”
This basically means that BiDi support is not there, while Hebrew/Arabic input is. Much like BeOS, and about one step below MacOS (OS X v10.2.x comes with very limited RTL support).
At this time, only Windows, KDE3 and GNOME2 offer reasonable BiDi support.
Prog.
I’m such a geek that when I heard “Twenty languages”, I thought it meant programming languages.
Mike Bouma wrote:
>As “mainstream” systems mostly support one language only by default
What? Well if the only mainstream OS you know is Windows maybe, but Mac OS has supported displaying almost any language by default since OS 8.5 (it was an pay for feature up until then), the input methods for some exotic languages (Indian stuff, double byte stuff) came free with the OS since OS 9.0.
With Mac OS X 10.0 all major languages were shipped with the default OS, so you could switch the language of the whole system and (almost) all applications (!) very easily.
RE “heh. id rather see money spen ton a chinese+japanese set than irish? how many irish gaelic speakers are there in the world? who is going to write apps with gaelic translations??”
It’s a little surprising that someone who can appreciate the advantages of maintaining and developing what is, at the moment, essentially a minority OS (and in saying this I mean no disrespect to Amiga users and supporters), cannot also appreciate the desire to maintain and develop a minority language.
“I’m such a geek that when I heard “Twenty languages”, I thought it meant programming languages.”
Me too, and I’m an Amigian since 1993. 🙂
>> As “mainstream” systems mostly support one language
>> only by default
> What? Well if the only mainstream OS you know is Windows
> maybe
With a Windows desktop market share of well over 90%, this fact alone would count for most mainstream systems.
Anyway having AOS4 translated into 20 different languages is IMO already a great achievement by the AmigaOS4 team.
>> As “mainstream” systems mostly support one language
>> only by default
> What? Well if the only mainstream OS you know is Windows
> maybe
hmm windows supports tonnes of languages.
hell, even windows 3.11 had a language chinese version…
This news is about >each< copy of AOS4 supporting 20 different languages by default. All Windows releases only support one language at a time AFAIK.
Good to see such commitment from the Amiga management and related companies towards the Amiga community. (Q&As, Articles, Tours, etc)
There are people who say that Amiga Inc produce nothing themselves, but this really isn’t true — Fleecy comes up with at least one new acronym every week.
Now if only Amiga would release some actual product, this might mean something.
Cool announcements are one thing. Deliverables are another, and so far Amiga’s delivered nothing but more press releases.
I’m looking forward to seeing a new Amiga released, but based on continually missed deadlines, I see nothing to get excited about here.
Does anyone remember all the hype when Gateway purchased the Amiga technology? Again… Nothing.
How about last years “pre-order” coupons? They were going on about how if they sold xxxx quantity, they’d give away so many free PC’s and such.
Perhaps if ol’ Fleecy put as much effort into putting out live, viable product as he does with his press releases, there might not be so much pessimism regarding Amiga V4. Instead we continue to see promises that never materialize.
There was someone who won an AmigaOne with AmigaOS4 as more than 1000 people joined the Amiga Club (includes a free discount coupon for exactly the amount of club money 50 USD/EURO, when AOS4 is available).
Hyperion, Amiga and Eyetech have good people on these projects. For me that all that counts, not what Gateway, Haage&Partner or Escom may or may not have done.
“Well if the only mainstream OS you know is Windows maybe”
Please…Windows supports MANY languages. It has for a very long time.
-G
gmlongo wrote:
[Quote]”Well if the only mainstream OS you know is Windows maybe”
Please…Windows supports MANY languages. It has for a very long time.[/Quote]
You don’t need to buy a special version of AmigaOS to have it in a specific language, as you need with Windows …
With AmigaOS You could make you own language if You would like to …
I don’t see support for Japanese or any other multi-byte language. That renders Amiga completely useless to me. Oh well, perhaps someday in the future.
I agree. I’m holding my thumbs that Japanese (it’s a patch) and JKFF will go on to work in OS4/MorphOS, or I will be forced to keep my current system online just for surfing Japanese sites.