I'm also not sure I'd blame the engineers in SV too much, of course they design software based on their own context. But with tech becoming global, it's a bit sad how it's not prioritized more.
Examples include bad dictionaries in other languages. Bad or no translations. And for instance in Norwegian we quote things like «ord» or „ord“, but all software I use do or makes it harder than just doing "ord". US systems assumes all addresses uses zip codes. My name contains a letter not in ascii, breaking lots of systems. I can't use vpn at work if I'm in a city with the letter Ø in it as some go proxy geoip location thingy crashes. ChatGPT can output in my language, but the language is stiff and feels off. If I ask it to rhyme, it doesn't but if I were to translate back to English it rhymes. Some systems ask me to input a time in am/pm and I've no idea which is when.
Or how things are moderated to an US standard. In Scandinavia boobs are fine, and in Danish newspapers you'd see them all the time. With global networks, we're now moderating to American "prudeness".
I actually think MS products are fairly good at this. They are big enough and have been around long enough to be fairly well localized. Word uses quotes ok and grammar is not terrible. Except it for decades have insisted on writing internet with a capital I for some reason, which we don't do.
Tell me about it. In my native language (European) we have accents at the end of some words (like città or pubblicità; city and advertisement respectively).
As someone that works with typography in someway or another, I can't count how many times I had a font that didn't support the character à or é or whatever and I had to choose a font that looks similar to the one I want but that if you look at the text for even a few moments more, you are guaranteed to notice it.
An even more disappointing fact is how many people use the apostrophe instead of the accent for capitalized letters (E' instead of É) because there no É button on the keyboard. Shift+è brings up é
> Some systems ask me to input a time in am/pm and I've no idea which is when.
I have a similar problem. Sometimes someone writes a date in the American MM/DD/YYYY format instead of the DD/MM/YYYY one and unless it's something like 08/24/2023 where there is no month 24, it can be pretty disorienting to me. That's why I really like the ISO (please fill me up on the number) YYYY-MM-DD: it's both clearly distinct for the other two and standardized across the world
> I actually think MS products are fairly good at this. They are big enough and have been around long enough to be fairly well localized
100% agree with you, although there are some other production that do a pretty good job (both FOSS like Jellyfin and commercial like Affinity Photo). Fun fact: Microsoft Word 2007's dictionary doesn't have the surnames of some of my classmates but has mine (which is something so rare it's basically impossible)
On a Mac it’s easy. Just hold down the letter and you will have options for pretty much any accent. Holding Capital E for example on iOS: Ë É E È Ê Ě Ę etc..
> on iOS
I think this works for any mobile keyboard (for example, AOSP's default keyboard supports that). In my language at least, the use of a capital letter with an accent is pretty rare, especially when we're talking about quick messages (which is what your most likely to write on mobile)