Apple Removes Flag Icons in Monterey 12.4 | Hacker News Reader

Apple Removes Flag Icons in Monterey 12.4

49 pointsericmay99 comments

For those of you who enjoyed having a flag icon on your menu bar by using the keyboard input work-around, Apple has replaced the beautiful flag icons with two-letter icons. This makes the Mac less fun, less colorful, and less enjoyable to use. For true international users (not those of us just using it to display something pretty) it'll be harder to tell what language you are using because flags are easier to identify than gray text. Bad UI move Apple.

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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.

I was curious how Apple handled this for Canada, IMO their (previous?) solution seems reasonable enough:

https://i.postimg.cc/SsT0Tsgs/Screen-Shot-2022-05-26-at-11-4...

It doesn't just use two-letter icons. The Arabic layouts show “ع”. The Hebrew layouts show “א‎”. The Greek layout shows “λ”. The Thai layouts show “ก”. The Canadian English layout shows “CA”, the French layout shows “FR”, the Canadian French layout shows “CA” above “CSA”, and the Swiss French layout shows “CH” above “FR”.

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.

Arabic as well. Loads of examples of such languages, with huge numbers of speakers. I think this is a reasonable change (and always found the colored icon in the menu bar to be gaudy anyway).

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.

There’s an easy way out: just make it a choice, like for the user menu.

Apple hates offering choices. But yes this would be the obvious option. Though in this particular case I don't really care but I can imagine some people would. It's also not really nice to change this in a point-update. UI changes should remain reserved for major updates IMO.

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.

Font vendors update their fonts, I'd guess.

Not great that a historical usage of the older flag would start rendering as the new one.

Maybe Unicode needs to incorporate a date into each glyph /s

The Afghan flag has this exact problem now. Plus the political issue of recognizing or not the Taliban government

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

That's mostly correct, but flags for countries with a recognised ISO country code will still be included, with I guess the most recent example being South Sudan.

One wonders what flags are next.

This is incorrect. Most flag emoji are based off of ISO 3166-1 alpha-2[0], which will continue to be updated. The Unicode Consortium’s decision to not accept new flags refers to flags outside that standard, like the pride flag or the flags of subnational regions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2

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']

In Ukraine this matters for a lot of people. Half if not the majority of ukrainians are russian-speaking and confusing russian language with russia is not something we like.

What I don't understand is why Apple cannot simply make this a toggle option in settings somewhere. No, it has to work one way and one way only...

Isn't that how Apple operates with everything in every instance?

There are plenty of boxes to check or uncheck in the system preferences, so no, this is not how “Apple operates with everything in every instance”.

Compare it to other OSes and you will see that 'plenty' is not actually a lot in this case.

I really was thrilled when I finally moved over to KDE from macOS. Over the years they had forced a number of changes I was really unhappy with. Like the inability to put virtual desktops in a grid, among others, that was pulled somewhere around 10.9 or so.

It turned out that KDE just offers this and most of my other annoyances with options. You want them in a line, you want them in a grid? Whatever you please. Also, choose what kind of transition, how you'd like to identify which one is active, etc etc. Everything can be configured. You can even name them if you like. It's really amazing being able to set everything up the way I need it again.

Apple had an OK baseline for me around the Tiger/Lion era, but after this they started going downhill. Launchpad, Mission Control etc were all regressions from the previous options like Expose. Also moving to ever lower-density UIs that mimic mobile devices (without actually offering touch support that necessitates bigger buttons) really annoyed me.

Very happy with the choice and the Qt-based FOSS software is similarly better than Apple's for the same reasons. Many configuration options and choices.

> Compare it to other OSes and you will see that 'plenty' is not actually a lot in this case.

"Plenty" in my case is "more than I care about" (plus, there are other things you can set up using the command line). The assertion in the OP twas that there was none whatsoever, though.

There’s be two systems to maintain. But the flags aren’t that valuable, and they aren’t needed for any sort of backwards compatibility.

I have a feeling the Russian invasion of Ukraine has something to do with this. As a Russian speaker in the US, I've already had some weird conversations with coworkers because of the Russian flag as a keyboard indicator. Obviously this is a minor inconvenience for me, but it seems outmoded to attach a language/keyboard layout to a national flag

ATMs in the EU have apparently started to use the Irish flag for English. Brexit removed the UK from the EU, and Ireland is the only EU country with English as its primary language.

Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/ezsjhj/all_atms_in...

I suspect the Irish aren't much happy about being the symbol for "English", either.

So... removing flags seems like a fine idea. They make so much sense in the common case, but there are enough corner cases to ditch the whole thing.

> Ireland is the only EU country with English as its primary language.

Speaking of politically correct, I can imagine some people from the gaeltacht would not approve of the description of English as the primary language in Ireland.

The good thing about flags is that they are visual icons. Country codes are usually in English and our script. How would this work in countries that can't read that? Or people visiting an ATM in e.g. an Arab country and having to find which option is "English" in Arabic. This is where flags really shine.

OK… but this is keyboard layouts. There is in fact a United Kingdom keyboard layout, which has little to do with geopolitics.

I will venture to guess it would turn into the letters “UK” in this case.

Having a flag displayed isn't apparently worth dealing with the controversy. Decisions like this make me feel like software isn't really designed for people.

Surely "avoiding controversy" or otherwise is exactly what's involved in designing for people?

Controversy is intrinsically a human issue so I'm not sure I get your point.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but it's funny because being designed for people is exactly why there is controversy.

This might be for political reasons. MS removed all flag emojis entirely in Windows 10, likely because of that island where all of our GPUs get manufactured, or the open air prison next to where our military surplus gets sent to.

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.

...what did he think it meant?

I didn't ask as I was pretty new at that point. I assume he thought I'd put it there to show political allegiance or something like that.

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.

Tbh when I used a Mac I did think it looked oddly inconsistent that it was the only colour in the status bar.

And as evidenced by OP some people obviously liked that, it's a change, of course some will like and some will not (and others will be indifferent).

It makes it much easier to tell which layout is active.

Specifically that it's in colour? Sure, if you have two layouts with very similar flags I suppose.

It's easier to find the icon because it stands out being colorful. And languages I use have very different flags. So it was super easy to tell which one is active.

Now the keyboard icon is lost in menu bar and it's hard to tell languages apart.

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.

DYMO has a little colored logo in my status bar, so it should be a few hours of someone who knows what they're doing to make a little app that replicates the original functionality.

Flags are powerful symbols for many people, some of which probably proudly displayed their respective one in the menu bar as a matter of virtue.

Sure - and I suppose the argument for removal is someone that needs to use "UK English" but doesn't want to see a UK flag in their menu bar ... but then why not make it a toggle?

Or I wonder if this has to do with the Taiwan flag or lack thereof.

> Or I wonder if this has to do with the Taiwan flag or lack thereof.

AFAIK there never was a Taiwanese flag there, and the different input methods for Chinese have non-flag icons (same for Japanese).

Surely a flag (country symbol) is the wrong identifier for a language though?

There is a many-to-many relation between countries and languages, so flag for language is a bad UI choice.

It is but it has become a standard over time. People know what it means. There are many cultural and language things that make zero sense but just became that way.

How is it standard?

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 iconography.

You can also have multiple layouts per proper locale (for example, en-US,) or multiple IME modes. Icons with more detail are strictly better. Flags are intuitive and recognizable. I feel as though people are being contrarian about this.

It doesn't just use two-letter codes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31521207

It sucks for me because the flags were how I knew which language I’m in when I switch between English and Asian languages. Now they all look the same out of the corner of my eye and I reflexively toggle the language when I don’t need to.

In Big Sur Apple was using a mix of flags and other icons. The flags seem to be for countries that use the Latin alphabet.

Playing around with the Keyboard Preferences, I've found:

Different Chinese inputs use different sinograms: the one for Pinyin uses the symbol for "Pin"

all Hebrew inputs use the Hebrew letter aleph

all Korean inputs use the same Korean symbol

all Thai inputs use the same Thai symbol

all Arabic inputs use the same Arabic symbol

Greek uses a lambda for one input and an epsilon for the other Russian curiously uses a Russian flag and not a Cyrillic letter

Except flags are a terrible way of identifying a language. Many (most?) countries have multiple official languages, and most languages are spoken in more than one country, so there is not a one to one mapping between flags and languages. And that's not even getting into the political side.

I am going to assume this has something to do with China/Taiwan/Hong Kong since that is the only market that is both big enough to force the change and where the political leadership is very sensitive about flag/name/border issues.

doubt it -- see my comment about how Chinese inputs are not using flags in Big Sur

This is ultimately a good move, and matches trends and emerging best practices on the web and elsewhere.

Some countries have more than one language. Some languages have more than one country. And the political implications of all of this all mixed in.

> This is ultimately a good move, and matches trends and emerging best practices on the web and elsewhere.

It solves some issues and creates others. Icons are more helpful than words in the menu bar, particularly as it gets more monochrome. And the complete confusion between buttons that look like text, links, actual buttons, and weird typography we find on the web is not exactly a good model to emulate. I really would not call that “best practices”, as they are responsible for a significant worsening of the UX on all mainstream platforms.

In general, the vast majority of UI elements are labeled with text instead of pictures, and have been for a long time. (Other issues with UI notwithstanding.)

Pro tip: Never use toggle button to switch input language, if you frequently switch between them. Just tap a specific key before you start input anything, so you no longer need to check/remember current state. Apple has been done the right thing on Mac Japanese keyboard.

Tap 英数 to input Alphabet, tap かな to input Japanese kana. https://store.storeimages.cdn-apple.com/8567/as-images.apple...

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-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.

It doesn't just use two-letter codes. The Arabic layouts show “ع”. The Hebrew layouts show “א‎”. The Greek layout shows “λ”. The Thai layouts show “ก”. The Canadian English layout shows “CA”, the French layout shows “FR”, the Canadian French layout shows “CA” above “CSA”, and the Swiss French layout shows “CH” above “FR”.

To be honest flags should never have been used to indicate language / keyboard layout / input method. It may be “fun” but these things only loosely correspond.

None of the input methods I use ever used flags anyway.

Did Apple merely change the language selection UI, or did they also remove flags from their emoji font?

OP only mentions the former, but many replies seem to be referencing the latter.

I've only noticed this in the language selection UI for keyboard input, but not for emoji.

I mean this seems broadly more sensible as a default option – it's quite hard to create a clear mapping between "keyboard layout" and "national flag".

If you would like to add a flag of some kind to the menu bar anyway, I'm sure it would be very straightforward to whip up a little application to add whatever icon you want up there!

Latin American Spanish already has been living in the future with this one. There was no way to pick a flag for that.

It has been said that a language is a dialect with a flag and an army, but, really, the correspondence between flags and languages is not great, and the use of flags to represent language choices has always been placing pretty above useful in a way which is worse the more diverse your international market is.

Actually, as someone who switches between US and PT layouts several times a day, I find the little flag an annoying RGB eyesore on an otherwise pristine monochrome menu bar.

GNOME also uses letters (and Windows), so I’m fine with that.

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.

Including the Sun itself.

> For true international users (not those of us just using it to display something pretty) it'll be harder to tell what language you are using because flags are easier to identify than gray text.

Indeed. That is a pain in the backside…

If you want a flag in your menubar that bad, take the long weekend to learn a little macOS programming. IIRC the API you'll want is NSStatusBar. (That might be outdated info, but hey, that's part of the fun.)

What? Surely it's much easier to tell a language by specifying it's two-letter code rather than a "flag" that may identify a country if you remember it, and which has nothing to do with a language

This is just plain terrible decision from UX perspective, which is why most people fell in love with mac in the first place.

I would definitely fire all responsible people if i were Steve Jobs.

I haven’t used a second layout in some time, but thanks for a clear indication and gering rid of these stupid icons which never made any sense to me. And they were way harder to decode.

I would say that I am a true international user with 3 layouts.

I just use the control-space keyboard shortcut, I get a big popup in the middle of the screen showing the currently selected keyboard map.

I'm not getting a large popup. How do you get it to show up?

I've been using this shortcut[0] to switch between input layouts. Before realizing that I could set a shortcut for it, I used this utility[1] + Alfred for it. This is still quite useful if you want to switch to a specific keyboard layout.

[0]: https://i.imgur.com/urcqU1i.png

[1]: https://github.com/myshov/xkbswitch-macosx

I didn't change any setting related to this and it has always been there. Like I said, the default shortcut is Control-Space.

Here is a thread with a screenshot and some users saying that the popup not working might be related to having the shortcut mapped to do something else: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3045492

Oh, I needed to enable the shortcut. It's working now.

https://i.imgur.com/mkuqSlw.png

I 100% applaud this. I've always used ABC Extended because I thought a flag in the system menu was gaudy and weirdly nationalistic.

I know I live in the US and use the American English keyboard layout. Similarly, I don't need a Chinese flag every time I switch to a Chinese keyboard.

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

The specific claim was weirdly nationalistic, which seems reasonable since lots of users outside America use the “American English” keyboard layout, to the point where it’s not clear why that’s the right signifier. Probably more Indian users use that layout than Americans.

Hanging a personal US flag in the US is a symbol of national pride (often by veterans) or a gaudy "'murica, fuck yeah!" statement (something like a dual axle pickup you only drive to Walmart) depending on your leanings.

Nothing is wrong with nationalism, especially the Penn Jillette brand of nationalism you seem to be advocating for. I'm just not flag-obsessed and find it weird to have a flag in my periphery for ten hours a day.

Do I support my "local community" when I type on a given keyboard layout ? And when I switch the layout because I need to type in a different script, do I betray my "local community" ? And what about I live in a country that's not my "original" local community and need to use yet another layout ? Do I feel insecure when I don't see a flag I know in my menu bar ?

I don’t see a Chinese flag… where are you seeing this? There are a ton of different Chinese input methods and they all have a symbol which is white text on a gray background. Same as Japanese.

I am just misremembering. I turned off the input icon because it's largely unnecessary. I don't really need the icon to know I'm in pinyin, or vice-versa.

Incidentally, that’s how Windows has been indicating keyboard input language in the taskbar all along.

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