Everyone talks about the new iPad and the revolution in interfaces that Apple brings upon us and I'm getting bit sick of it, even though I hope the iPad will be good enough so I can get my mom one (tech support sucks :). However, the specs page doesn't list Greek as a supported language, which got me thinking...

Mac OS X does not have Greek UI support at all. The local importer provides a patch that adds it but I never bothered with that, having literally grown up amidst English interfaces (I learned the correct pronunciation of many tech words when I moved to London for a year - until then, I've never heard anyone saying words like 'archive' out loud). You can install an aspell dictionary to get spell checking, and can write in Greek (thanks to Unicode) and that's pretty much it. Most of the nice fonts (Gill Sans, Futura) do not even have Greek glyphs.

However, the iPhone 3.1 OS, coinciding with Apple making deals with 2 of the big 3 telecom carriers in Greece supports a lot in Greek: UI, fonts, input dictionary and 3GS also has voiceover support (Hear a voice over of this post ). If the iPad supports a similar level of Greek, it's a sure thing my mom gets one.

What does this have to do with 'innovative interfaces'? I'll get to that, but first let me introduce you to the concept of accents in written Greek. An accent, called "tonos", is a diacritical mark that is positioned on a Greek words to denote on which syllable the stress goes to. It's only omitted for single-syllable words, for obvious reasons. Here is an example: "τόνος", the cute little ΄ there is the "tonos".

So far in my computing experience, DOS + Windows + Mac there's been a single way to enter those: Switch the keyboard to the Greek layout (a slightly modified US layout), hit the ';' button, then type the vowel to be accented. Mac OS X has a nice feature where it shows you the accent-to-be-inserted:

This means that if you forget to put an accent in, you need to delete the letter, then try again. Not exactly intuitive, but it's something you learn really quickly when typing Greek.

iPhone introduced a different mechanism: You type the vowel first, then you hit a dedicated accent button, and the accent is set:

I was very pleasantly surprised the first time I saw that. The reason? It's the way Greek children are taught to put accents when learning to write (the alternative would be absurd to think about, really). So someone at Apple, which as a company does not have a good track record of Greek localisation, sat down and thought about how entering accents in Greek could be better, and implemented it. I don't have to show my mom how to put accents on an iPhone, because it's in plain sight, and the first thing she'll try to do is going to work.

This is something us geeks how are really entrenched in the current way of doing things should really, really think about.

So why the iPad doesn't list Greek as supported? Probably because it takes time to do proper localisation, and Greece is a small market. If Apple doesn't sell the iPad through a carrier deal, it may never get Greek support. However, having seen this example of detail-oriented design, I hope they are just taking their time to do things properly. We'll see when the damn thing is actually released, so I promise this is the first and last time I mention it on this blog.