Phoenix devices

[NoUserFound]

Guys,

Don't bother getting your hopes up. Phoenix smells very strongly like a fly-by-night institution. Also... No Phoenix International Communications Incorporated exists as a proper legal entity and, as a result, is running afoul of US law. Perhaps their intentions are good, but so far this has been all talk and no real evidence of actual work. Finally, if they plan on trying to make hardware and fund this via Kickstarter, I seriously don't see that working out at all. There's just too much on the line here and it's probably best to just move along. If anyone or any entity can affect change, it would have to be well-established groups like webOS-Internals.


~NoUserFound

[brandongoeszoom]

Originally Posted by Remy X

French? Yes.

Most of Africa, and in the past also the "French Indo-China" countries like Viet Nam and Cambodia, though i'm inclined to think that nowadays those have switched to English in some ways (technology and trade), and in Cambodia, almost every educated person had died in Pol Pot's death camps back in the '70s, so they have started from scratch.

Africa is relatively easy, since in some tribes, French is the only written language, while the local dialects are only spoken and won't require spellcheck functionality

I think it's a worthy goal to add support for obscure languages to openwebOS (and later patch legacy code), but definitely not the priority. But another language to add to your list of "colonial" languages would be Russian. That would cover the whole of the former Soviet Union, and then also Bulgaria, which uses a Cyrilic charset but different spellings of words, so Bulgarians can understand quite a bit of Russian.

If we support Russian but leave off Ukrainian, support Spanish but not Catalan, and so on, we would have a chance to perfect the support of those core "colonial" languages (spellcheck, autocorrect) and be on par with Apple before moving on to the local dialects and obscure languages of the 3rd world. There is no use in being sub-par in everything, "jack of all trades and master of none". If we can perfect the classical, non-regional forms of the main languages, and not have autocorrect erase the eloquence and sophistication of the writer, in the long run, it will be worth more than supporting Gujarati or Telugu.

Those guys can have a "language pack" to download, which includes a font and a keyboard layout, later on, optional translations for system preferences apps, and if someone volunteers to translate the help app docs, that too. But spellcheck will have to wait, until the Android spellcheck dictionaries can be extracted in a few clicks and put to use by us.


Edit: I'm thinking, when it comes to major Asian languages, webOS already supports the Chinese (Han) characters (aka kanji, hanzi, hanja) including the fonts and input methods. We can also move in that direction, to support Japanese (the language of anime) and Mandarin (mainland china, "simplified chinese"). This would be reasonable.

This would actually be a great community effort. I know absolutely nothing about creating language packs or the like, but I'd definitely do all I could to help (and try to find some others to help as well). I know that Rody mentioned on the Open webOS forums that the lack of Chinese support for Open webOS out of the box had to do with the "lack of open source fonts (and, of course, time to test, package, deploy)." I'm assuming that for these non-Latin based languages, we'd need to create our own fonts, or find open sourced versions of them, so we can send them upstream. That'd certainly help Open webOS as a whole. Unfortunately, I don't speak any other languages, so I don't see how I could help in that regard, but if anyone is willing to at least make an attempt at this, I think we should give it a go!

[Remy X]

Originally Posted by brandongoeszoom

This would actually be a great community effort. I know absolutely nothing about creating language packs or the like, but I'd definitely do all I could to help (and try to find some others to help as well). I know that Rody mentioned on the Open webOS forums that the lack of Chinese support for Open webOS out of the box had to do with the "lack of open source fonts (and, of course, time to test, package, deploy)." I'm assuming that for these non-Latin based languages, we'd need to create our own fonts, or find open sourced versions of them, so we can send them upstream. That'd certainly help Open webOS as a whole. Unfortunately, I don't speak any other languages, so I don't see how I could help in that regard, but if anyone is willing to at least make an attempt at this, I think we should give it a go!

Alright.

I have a pretty good idea of what needs to be done, so yeah, we can get to work on it as soon as some other priorities are taken care of. I currently have a backlog of patches and projects that i'm working on at the same time (TBH, i shouldn't even be posting right now), but in another month, i might join in on this.

Regarding Chinese language support, it's coming together rather nicely on the legacy devices, with fonts, input and (Chomper's?) "Just Speak". I'm not so sure about spellcheck quality, but then if we can get the same accomplished for all the major/colonial languages, it will help Gram attract corporate clients