This is sort of a guest column entrty. A while ago, I wrote about iPhone 3 Unicode support, and a reader Sorin Sbarnea sent me this following as a comment.
Sorin Sbarnea
I was interested in adding a comment to your article from
http://www.personal.psu.edu/ejp10/blogs/gotunicode/2009/06/iphone-30-unicode-support-stil.html
but I was not able to find any way of adding a comment on the page.
IPhone 3.0 does have full support for all Romanian characters,
previous versions did not. In order to be able to enter special
characters you need to use a Romanian keyboard. Due to ergonomics they
decided to not include all character on one keyboard because it would
be too hard to use. Also I want to say that the drag model is genuine
and very practical – after few days you’ll see that is much smarter
and more precise than the old click model.
I remember that I submitted 3 bugs on Apple for Romanian support, they
solved one in 2.1 and the rest in 3.0 – so all you have to do is to
complain to them 😉
Just to give you an example: in the first implementation of the
Romanian keyboard the Ă character was the last on the right of the
list of accented A characters after characters that are not used in
Romanian – I complained to them explaining the reasons and now they
solved it. I don’t know if I was the cause or the only one complaining
but they solved it anyway. Also – I wasn’t able to find *any* error in
Romanian translation of the iPhone – this is something very good –
let’s say I wasn’t expecting this level of quality for Romanian
translation.
Comments
The lesson here is that Apple does listen…if you know where to send input. Still not convinced about dragging on the iPhone in general (except for solitaire), but I can be stubborn. I’m glad Sorin is a satisfied Apple customer.
As to the question about submitting comments – I disabled mine because about 99% of them were offers for land in Florida or pharmaceuticals I cannot use. For now, please feel free to contact me at ejp10@psu.edu. If I hear an outcry for commenting, I may change my mind.
