Friday, September 23, 2016

MacOS Sierra New Language Features

During  a quick review of MacOS Sierra, I’ve found only few new language features:

+No new user interface localizations

+No new language keyboards

+1 new spellcheck setting — Japanese English

+2 new reference dictionaries — Traditional Chinese and Danish

+2 new English translation dictionaries — Dutch and Italian.

+An option to use Caps Lock to switch quickly to/from Latin and non-Latin input sources (strangely this does not work with Cyrillic, Greek, or Armenian).

Presumably it also has the new Siri support and Chinese/Japanese fonts mentioned in
this page.

One useful feature -- the ability to easily set the Format Language to something other than the System Language -- has been removed in Sierra.  A workaround for this using the Command Line can be found here.

If readers find other new features, let me know.

1 comment:

Mac said...

Hi Tom,

This is not exactly a language feature, but perhaps of interest to several of your readers. I'm not even using Sierra yet, but from TidBITS http://tidbits.com/article/16826 I learned that Apple has changed the way the Language & Region prefs work, such that there is now no longer any easy way to get the names of months in a language that’s different from the primary system language.

This is a nuisance to those like my Thai wife, who, for example, like to set her Primary System Language to "English" and her Date & Time format to "Buddhist."

Surely there must be many more Mac users in America who like to set their language to English and their Date & Time format to European.

As Adam suggested, I have written to Apple and would encourage others to do so as well. http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

Thanks,

-- Mac