Chinese Character Input for Apple
Apple’s IME system in OS X is about the most painless in existence as far as I have seen. Adding input support for different languages is as easy as checking a tick-mark in a box. Unfortunately, in practice, it proves to be a bit less user friendly when dealing with certain languages. In my case, the support for Chinese characters is a bit cumbersome. The standard Apple “International” IME only allows entry of one charcter at a time, while Microsoft’s IMEs will input multiple-character phrases (good luck figuring out how to set it up, though).
Also, you could previously buy tablets and third-party software for hand-written character recognition, such as PenPower, but those have been discontinued as far as my research on the subject has shown. With InkWell being integrated within OS X one would think that character recognition would be a breeze to implement (just license an algorithm from a third party), but it looks as if Apple only cared enough to include support for European languages in InkWell, which is a shame, because a Modbook with Chinese character recognition would be super-sweet.
The best answer I have found to date to the first problem, that of keyboard input, is to install OpenVanilla, but even that has its drawbacks. First, it defaults to Simplified Chinese input in pinyin, even though OS X supports both Traditional and Simplified. Why not have a preference item to select the default input? Odd. Also, the input system itself is a bit clunky, unless I’m just doing something wrong. When you input a pinyin word that has more than ten possible character matches, hitting the space bar, which would normally select the first match, takes you to the next set of ten matches, so there is no way to select the first match, which is usually the one you want. It just keeps cycling through the match sets. Annoying.
Apple needs to get their buns in gear. With Leopard coming out soon, better IME support is going to be a big factor in my impression of it. InkWell needs to be updated to include popular non-Euro languages, like Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, etc. Especially the Asian, non-phonetic scripts, which certainly seem like the more logical choice for handwritten input, as opposed to languages like English which work just fine via keyboard input.
Also, with OS X having been out for eons the third-party developers need to get cracking with more software too. Too many companies never left the dustbin of OS 9 since Classic was there in OS X to fall back on, then Apple yanked it in 10.4. Heck, even the Vistas Spanish text still comes with an outdated piece of multimedia software that isn’t technically supposed to run on OS X (but does if you don’t follow the instructions) which is actually kind of ridiculous since I assume most of these multimedia CD-ROMS are built with Macromedia software like Flash, and would only mean they’d have to re-export the previous file on a new system. One more reason for Language technology specialists to get in gear and actually start producing more software instead of just using what is given to them by the consumer market.
