91–100 of 108 posts
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 t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
No it doesn't. Just because people do start wars over most of those things doesn't mean they should. It only takes a little shift to a less insular perspective to realise that the world doesn't have to be that way.
You really need both; there are layout/locale variations within the same language across countries (e.g. en-*: en-US, en-UK, etc.) and within the same country across languages (e.g. *-CA: en-CA, fr-CA).
A naïve solution would be superimposing a two-letter language code on a flag, but if avoiding flag-related politics is part of the calculus here, maybe there's a better approach.
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.
Whether politics are involved or not, this is a move from one insufficient solution (mapping keyboard layouts to expressed nationality) to another insufficient solution (mapping keyboard layouts to two-character language codes). You really need both; there are layout/locale variations within the same language across countries (e.g. en-*: en-US, en-UK, etc.) and within the same country across languages (e.g. *-CA: en-…
A lot of people are pointing out that flags are not 1:1 with layouts. (Not languages people; languages and layouts aren’t 1:1 either!) True… but, Alpha 2 ISO 3166 codes are also not 1:1 with layouts. Apple wasn’t just using flags, they were using icons with more or different details depending. I haven’t seen the two letter icons but I’m having a lot of trouble believing they can convey as much information as the old…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No it doesn't. Just because people do start wars over most of those things doesn't mean they should. It only takes a little shift to a less insular perspective to realise that the world doesn't have to be that way.
A shift that the vast majority of human beings who have ever lived have not made and will not make. Even if that shift were desirable, it's not going to happen. If you tell people that their nation is an irrelevant construct, most of them will tell you to FO.
Why not having language icons. Sometimes they correspond to flags sometimes not. The point being that a colorful icon is a better GUI indicator than a two letter gray di-gramm. After all, we have emojis for pretty much everything under the Sun.
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 t…
...what did he think it meant?