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Apple Removes Flag Icons in Monterey 12.4

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Apple Removes Flag Icons in Monterey 12.4

#51

Post by Veen »

drcongo wrote: post #27
alex_sf wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with nationalism? Do you also think supporting your local community is weird?

Quoted post unavailable.

> You know countries are just made up right?

So are flags, programming languages, natural languages, genders, political parties, ideologies, religions, racial categories, and about a million other things people care deeply about. Dismissing human constructs as "made up" and therefore irrelevant betrays a complete lack of understanding about how human beings operate.

Re: Apple Removes Flag Icons in Monterey 12.4

#52

Post by kzrdude »

akersten wrote: post #8
bombcar wrote: post #3

I don't really see how having "EN" instead of a US or UK or whatever flag is really going to make people happier or sadder.

Out of the corner of my eye I can see if my keyboard is in US mode (red/white/blue) or Spanish (yellow/red). Can't do that now, need to actually move my eyes to the corner of the screen to read low contrast grayscale ES or EN. Horrible UI regression.

Some kind of visual cue would be good - but what's the solution - another set of icons, color coding, or what? Maybe black for system default and other bright colors for the remaining choices.

Re: Apple Removes Flag Icons in Monterey 12.4

#53

Post by cabirum »

OJFord wrote: post #12
ceejayoz wrote: post #4

The Unicode Consortium has indicated they won't accept new flags as emoji. https://www.engadget.com/unicode-no-flag-emoji-please-131509... Given this, it's a sensible move; it won't be long before the available set no longer reflects the full set of countries.

Related issue I hadn't thought of before: what happens if the flag is changed? Suppose it partly depends if the unicode description is 'flag of the country blah' or blazon-style description of what it looks like.

Unicode supports alternate character styles and combining characters, they can be used to refer to specific flag "versions"

Re: Apple Removes Flag Icons in Monterey 12.4

#56

Post by elldoubleyew »

strict9 wrote: post #29

Flags are not the way to define a language preference. This design decision assumes 1:1 parity with flag and language which is just not true. This move makes language preferences less ambiguous or potentially less offensive and I applaud Apple for doing it.

Note that for many languages a flag is not displayed rather a symbol. Chinese languages in particular follow this (拼 for simplified pinyin, 注 for traditional zhuyin).

Also Japanese never displayed a flag (あ for hiragana, ア for katakana).

I think it's better to follow this convention.

Re: Apple Removes Flag Icons in Monterey 12.4

#57

Post by SllX »

strict9 wrote: post #29

Flags are not the way to define a language preference. This design decision assumes 1:1 parity with flag and language which is just not true. This move makes language preferences less ambiguous or potentially less offensive and I applaud Apple for doing it.

Counterpoint: these weren’t necessarily language-specific but country-specific or sometimes dialect-specific or writing system-specific (Hiragana, Katakana, Romaji) or just plain alternative (DVORAK) input methods.

My main keyboard input method is not “English” but “U.S.”, and it is one of 15 English-language keyboard input methods available in the Keyboard Input Sources pane. Since I have it set to US most of the time, I kept it in my menubar for the the last 16 years specifically so I could have a nice American flag icon up top in addition to a way to switch between keyboard input sources using the mouse.

This change was unnecessary and doesn’t do anything to make the input sources less offensive, but merely removes some of the cultural flavor available out of the box.

Re: Apple Removes Flag Icons in Monterey 12.4

#58

Post by layer8 »

leipert wrote: post #31

Flags are not languages: http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-re... Arguably it makes a little more sense for keyboard layouts, but even then. Edit: also with alternative layouts. Is Dvorak English? If you want you can create your own keyboard layout with Ukulele https://software.sil.org/ukelele/ (or edit an existing one) and change the icon to any image.

Two-letter icons also don’t help with alternative layouts. Flags are useful for e.g. US English vs. UK English, but are bad when a country has more than one official/widely-used language (e.g. Canada) or when multiple countries share the same keyboard language and layout.

Re: Apple Removes Flag Icons in Monterey 12.4

#59

Post by kzrdude »

ceejayoz wrote: post #4

The Unicode Consortium has indicated they won't accept new flags as emoji. https://www.engadget.com/unicode-no-flag-emoji-please-131509... Given this, it's a sensible move; it won't be long before the available set no longer reflects the full set of countries.

Flags don't even have their own codepoints. (Swedish flag emoji was stripped by HN when it was verbatim in the below)

    import unicodedata
    [unicodedata.name(c) for c in "\U0001f1f8\U0001f1ea"]
    ['REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER S', 'REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER E']

Re: Apple Removes Flag Icons in Monterey 12.4

#60

Post by malauxyeux »

The flags led to a tense discussion with my boss once.

At my first office job in Canada, I was given a Mac. I activated US QWERTY for programming and CSA to be able to write messages with French accents.

One day not long after, I'm programming with US QWERTY enabled – US flag in the menu bar – and my boss comes up behind me, points, and says, "What ... is ... that ... ?"

It felt like it took forever to convince him that the flag just signified that I was using a particular keyboard layout and that it didn't mean anything else – to me, anyway.

All completely avoidable.

For better or worse, people assign a lot of meaning to flags. I can see why it's sensible to avoid using them for something benign like keyboard layout.

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