Hacker News Reader

Comment by strict9 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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).

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com