Just a little rant about software installation!
polycounter lvl 18
OK, so I was installing the newest version of QuickTime today (which seems to only come bundled with iTunes, which I don't want, but that's a different rant altogether!), and when it got to the language selection screen, it gives me an option of "English (United States)"... and that's the only option for English. Why?!
It doesn't say "Japanese (Japan)" or anything like that. It just has plain "Japanese" or "Danish".
Does this mean that if I speak English, I must live in the US? Some installations give a choice between "English (United States)" and "English (International)" ... does this mean they just change every Z to an S, and add the U back into "colour" and "honour"? Why give two options? English should always be understandable if you come from an English-speaking country. Couldn't they just have an option for "English" and leave it at that? Or do US citizens need to be reminded of what language they speak?
"Gee, it doesn't have American in here as an option... oh wait, it says United States here, that must be us."
Is there an actual reason behind this seeming silliness, or is it just an arbitrary decision on the side of software-makers?
It doesn't say "Japanese (Japan)" or anything like that. It just has plain "Japanese" or "Danish".
Does this mean that if I speak English, I must live in the US? Some installations give a choice between "English (United States)" and "English (International)" ... does this mean they just change every Z to an S, and add the U back into "colour" and "honour"? Why give two options? English should always be understandable if you come from an English-speaking country. Couldn't they just have an option for "English" and leave it at that? Or do US citizens need to be reminded of what language they speak?
"Gee, it doesn't have American in here as an option... oh wait, it says United States here, that must be us."
Is there an actual reason behind this seeming silliness, or is it just an arbitrary decision on the side of software-makers?
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I tend to go between saying color and colour humor and humour depending on my moods anyways.
BTW i think you can uninstall iTunes afterwards if you want to.
Side note: If one more friggin game installs dx9c i'm going to blow up on someone at microsoft. Every single new game ive installed has required me to install it... i had it the whole time!
n30: Haha, yeah... also, recently I was trying to install MechCommander, and it was saying stuff like "WARNING! You don't have DirectX6 installed! Are you sure you want to continue installation?!"
Toomas: Yeah, I can see how that would be the case for some programs, but since when has Quicktime needed to know currency or time settings - I would have thought that it would "learn" settings from Windows, or the Windows clock and keyboard settings would be the default "override" anyway.
I know I can uninstall iTunes afterwards... but there's the extra download time, and it shouldn't really be necessary to uninstall software I don't want - that'd be like Microsoft saying I had to download a copy of Media Player if I wanted IE (or maybe they do that already?
I didn't NEED Internet Explorer 6 to RUN MSN Messenger or Windows XP to run Doom3. Hell I don't even need DX9 to run Doom3 (works on dx7 just fine!)
English (Redneck)
English (Monty Python)
English ('arry Pott'ah)
Too many options. Either way, you're talking about a company that can't make a functional media player unless it's a browser plugin.
hear hear to mop and rick! I get annoyed scrolling through location lists too with United States first, and United Kingdom miles down the bottom. U should not appear before A damnit
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Even if "United States" was listed alphabetically, "United Kingdom" would still be miles down the bottom. It would only be moved up one spot. Maybe countries should be listed by their GDP, so all of the large, industrialized nations would be close to the top. Of course, I'm sure that would still piss some people off.
Surely there's a way to detect what Keyboard/Regional Settings the user has, and set that to the default language option of installs?
ElysiumGX: Heh, my Quicktime player often crashes in browser plugin form. However, that might just be Firefox, I'm not sure.
You know then it magically scrolls down :P
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/win.html
right hand side...
under the picture of the two little girls...
QuickTime Standalone Installer...
psst...
direct link...
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/standalone.html
Toomas: Hehehe
When I make a video game, I know if I market it to twin african siamese 93 year old blind women, it's only going to sell 4 copies, so I shouldn't spend too much on it. It's the same principle, know your audience.
There's no need to differentiate between "US English" and "International English" (whatever the hell that is!) for a simple software installation.
US folks: Raise your hands if you or people you know aren't sure if you speak "English" or "American"
In short, Quicktime and itunes are evil.
Also MoP, yes, it's their language. They own it. When I first moved here, a woman who makes coffee in the building at work said to my English friend Chris "So, did you have to learn our language before moving here?"
That and US is usually first in the dropdown menu because the millions of us installing the software would much rather just hit enter or leave the field be, then scroll down and select US. And wouldn't having the first world nations listed first in the order make more sense than alphabetical order? That is...unless you're afraid you'll piss off the whole dozen or less people in Afghanistan who might be using a product...
...whine...I can't believe a thread was even made about this.
Oh btw, time to have some fun with this...because you decided to American bash at the end, so here goes:
The Quicktime Language Selector includes:
Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
Danish
Dutch (Netherlands)
English (United States)
Finnish
French (France)
German (Germany)
Italian (Italy)
Japanese
Korean
Norwegian (Bokmal)
Spanish (Traditional Sort)
Swedish
...I guess everyone with a bracketed explanation next to their country must be stupid when it comes to recognizing their language.
BTW, I never got a country selector...guess someone is special.
Illusions, did you even read what I said? Read my posts again, you will see that your points are completely negated. I don't care that "US" is top of the drop down list, that's not what I'm talking about! Go and read!
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...you are selecting which language pack to use. A language pack includes a list of fonts. By selecting English (United States) you are choosing English as the language and the font associated with that selection (English United States).
BTW, your quip about Americans having English (United States) would then also apply to the French, Italians, Germans, etc.
Thanks for the whine, I'm awaiting my cheese.
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It doesn't say "Japanese (Japan)" or anything like that. It just has plain "Japanese" or "Danish".
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That, and this little "Oh I'll choose the few countries that don't have a () next to them to further my point" while ignoring the four others like ours just shows that you were out to whine, plus the unneccessary insult.
Which fonts exactly do Americans need that "International" English speakers don't? Or vice-versa? My keyboard is a UK layout, it has a $ sign on it. The currency symbols are the only ones I can think of that should differ between English-speaking countries. Our numbers are the same and there are the same number of letters in the alphabet, and the same number of variations on each letter (accents, etc.).
Why can't there be one single unified "English" language pack, instead of two different ones for "US" and "International"? That's basically what I'm saying.
edit to match your edit: Well, I actually just chose those as an example - why are there no brackets after Japanese? Yeah, it says "German (Germany)", but that's the only option for German. There's no "German (International)" ... why would there be? It's all German.
OK, I wasn't aware that the language selection meant using a different set of fonts.
Which fonts exactly do Americans need that "International" English speakers don't? Or vice-versa? My keyboard is a UK layout, it has a $ sign on it. The currency symbols are the only ones I can think of that should differ between English-speaking countries. Our numbers are the same and there are the same number of letters in the alphabet, and the same number of variations on each letter (accents, etc.).
Why can't there be one single unified "English" language pack, instead of two different ones for "US" and "International"? That's basically what I'm saying.
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My guess is that the font packs are probably un-altered since their original creation (except perhaps English International which may now include the Euro symbol) simply due to the fact that someone would have to be paid to make it, and then paid every now and then for the use of it. Some programs have just English, usually small company releases, or privately created ones. I'm also guessing possible keyboard layout from earlier decades. Some program installed a font pack that also shows up in Character Map for me, and its English has the accented letters in totally different locations on the map than Spanish does. So in fact, it may be possible that the English (United Kingdom) and English (United States) has the currency symbols swapped in the map.
That, and theres the fact that certain countries have different date layouts, like November 27th, 2005 is 11/27/2005 here, where-as elsewhere it may be 27/11/2005, or even 2005/11/27
*shrugs*
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edit to match your edit: Well, I actually just chose those as an example - why are there no brackets after Japanese? Yeah, it says "German (Germany)", but that's the only option for German. There's no "German (International)" ... why would there be? It's all German.
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Because Japanese is mainly only spoken in Japan, which would have an associated font map, language, etc.
As for German, there may possibly be a language pack for other German speaking countries as well (possibly Poland). As there is probably a French (International) for french speaking countries that would use other character maps like the Caribbean and Canada...
http://www.unicode.org/standard/WhatIsUnicode.html
With Unicode, there shouldn't be a problem with all of this, from what I'm reading. Anyway, like I said earlier, why can't installer programs just take the Language and Country settings from the global Windows settings? That way every installed program would be working from the same template. It's not like Windows doesn't come with all of the text packs installed already - why the hell would I want to install Quicktime in Spanish if Windows is set up with English as the language and UK as the location?
Illusion, Polish is spoken in Poland not German.
Heh, my Quicktime player often crashes in browser plugin form. However, that might just be Firefox, I'm not sure.
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Seems more often in Firefox. Works perfectly in Opera. On my desktop, the Quicktime player would crash if I moved the window, upgraded, now it crashes when I press play. Pity, because .mov format is awesome. I just use VLC, problem solved.
Perhaps they should do away with the language selection, and every country just learn English. The language of computers. :P
Perhaps they should do away with the language selection, and every country just learn English. The language of computers. :P
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It would be unfair!
Humans would just have to learn binary (and go insane and die and then bird-flu would be useless and humans would win the war against birds and everyone would be happy (and dead, except the birds))
The Quicktime Language Selector includes:
Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
Danish
Dutch (Netherlands)
English (United States)
Finnish
French (France)
German (Germany)
Italian (Italy)
Japanese
Korean
Norwegian (Bokmal)
Spanish (Traditional Sort)
Swedish
...I guess everyone with a bracketed explanation next to their country must be stupid when it comes to recognizing their language.
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...or they're just safeguarding their own stupidity, because they list foreign languages in the english language rather than the native one.
I personally always use english because every piece of software on this machine is, but I'm not surprised if somebody from the Netherlands ('Nederland') doesn't know that in English they call our native language 'Nederlands', 'Dutch' - alienating the group of people you translate software for in the first place. I suppose it's too much trouble to put 'francais' (french), 'deutsch' (german) or 'nederlands' (dutch) - just to naem a few.
I really don't care though, I speak UK, US and international english anyway.
hear hear to mop and rick! I get annoyed scrolling through location lists too with United States first, and United Kingdom miles down the bottom. U should not appear before A damnit
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We invented the internet... deal with it.
We invented the internet... deal with it.
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Dont be cocky or i will uninvent it!
Nothing had been uninvented to the day when Toomas uninvented the internet and caused the whole universe to collapse into single triangle and then came god and extruded the universe back it its former glory but his mouse broke down and he could not extrude just one little being - flaagan - and then the saint flaagan became the first person to be unintentionally uninvented and now he lives in every one of us as a single vertex and blesses our mice so that noone will be unintentionally uninvented again.
-teh new bible (published in 2666 a.d. by MicroReligion)
We invented the internet... deal with it.
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We invented the web, deal with that
We invented the internet... deal with it.
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/runs around with an American flag chanting "USA!USA!"