7 Jul 2010

google and languages

google and its services are available in many different languages, which is good. the bad thing: it does not follow any consistent rule for labeling all these languages in drop-down list.

assume you came to the Netherlands carrying your own laptop with English as the default language. open google.com web page and see Dutch. it is wise to use geolocation and redirect URL to a local server, it will handle requests faster. on the other hand, it is stupid to change also the language of the page ignoring user-agent string. actually the local server is available in English, why you are not redirected there?..

google.nl language
ok, this is not the main point, it takes only few clicks to change settings manually, see the snapshot on the right.



google.eg language
the pitfall: all the languages are labeled in Dutch. although it is not a problem to guess English in many European languages, can you easily do the same in Egypt with labels in Arabic?
of course in this case you can use Google.com in English link at the bottom, but it is not available on other google sites. what is offered instead?




a wikipedia-like style, when all the languages are labeled in their native transcript. for example chrome download.
it is rather wise, people can easier recognize letters of their native language. what if the translation to your language is not available? search through the long unsorted list to pick something acceptable? it can be very annoying.




another google example contains labels in the local and native languages (found on blogger). what is the point to do this? if you know the local language, you are already there. if not, there is no advantages over previous example.




the most sensible approach is used on knol, here English label is supplemented by native. it combines all the advantages, you can easily find the native language or select preferable from the sorted list.



all these examples are discovered during one day. I would not be surprised if google used even more combinations, which are not consistent.

6 Jul 2010

keychain in applications

some developers do not use keychain to store the passwords (why?). I started to promote the keychain usage in different applications, the links are below
Mendeley
AppFresh
DynDNS Updater
Kindle (?)
Anki

3 Jul 2010

password duplication in keychain

keychain on Mac OS X may contain several password records, which actually refer to the same password. for example, searching for "google" in keychain gives three records:
- jabber - application password (iChat)
- google.com - internet password (Firefox, Safari, Chrome)
- jabber - internet password (Adium)
you could also have POP3/IMAP/SMTP passwords on gmail, if you use Mail. they all refer to one password for google account. this means that the password cannot be changed in one place anymore. fail.
what can be done? merging of the records is not possible, since different applications look for saved passwords using their rules. maybe aliasing or symlinking of all duplications to one record is possible? then how to handle different kinds of records (application password, internet password, web form password)?