That American flag

[charles]

Hi:

We have received a number of complaints about the flags privately and on other forums. The problem is that we try to assign a default language based on your system preferences. Mac OS X is really not very good about reporting information about your system, so sometimes we get this wrong. You can change the default language in Preferences but most people don't think about that right away. Instead they just write in the wrong language setting. Before this was not a problem because users who did not use the Language specific features anyway never really noticed because it. Now they see a flag at the bottom and accuse us of imperialism.

We are dealing with two usability problems here:

1. Obviously, the best solution is to try to guess the writing language correctly all the time. We are working on some ideas to do this more often, but there are always going to be times where you will open a document and it will be in a language you didn't want. Particularly if it came from someone using Word since most Word is really bad about marking all text as being in US English even if it is not.

2. The flag was added to make your current writing language more obvious. This is helpful for multilingual users but for others it can stress them out. Its like seeing a blinking warning light. While in reality, this setting may not matter for you, just seeing the warning light will make you wonder. We need to tone down this setting so that it is still informative for multilingual writers

Also, the reason the flags are bigger than everything else in the status bar is because those icons are provided by OS X and they vary in size. Sometimes they can be huge and look really bad. If we use something other than flags, we might be able to fix this. There are some others things we might do also. I think having the status bar at the bottom is a good idea though because you have to have some space taken up there by the resize handle in the bottom right hand corner. This make the most effective use of the space.

Ok...so that's probably way more information than you ever needed about this topic. marc gave such a nice long post I thought I owed him one.

Cheers,
-Charles

[marc]

Thanks for the info Charles... IMHO it's good to see your reasoning discussed, and show that there are actually good reasons for just about everything you've done.

As for the long post, well, it can be a hard life being the self-appointed UI-dweeb... and 'yes', I do have a little tendency of going on a bit...

...oh, what's that? ...You noticed?

[marc]

Also, the reason the flags are bigger than everything else in the status bar is because those icons are provided by OS X and they vary in size. Sometimes they can be huge and look really bad. If we use something other than flags, we might be able to fix this.

Well, to keep on flogging this dead horse(!), IMHO it's not so much that the flag icon is bad, or too large etc., which as you say, you don't control, so much as the icons just aren't spaced out enough. If the ruler icon was made to be as long as the flag, and you could come up with something meatier for the text formatting icon, I personally think it would all be roses.

Ok...so that's probably way more information than you ever needed about this topic.

Not me!