Kickstarter 2013 Revisited

[Mark Waddingham]

> I think of myself as a developer. Everything I do these days is 
> in-house,
> and has absolutely no need of unicode. The most recent thing I worked 
> on
> for others is Navigator, and no one has ever asked me for a unicode 
> version
> of that. The last app I worked on before that has been selling for the 
> past
> 12 years or so, internationally, and no one has asked for a unicode 
> version
> of that. Maybe I'm unique, but for my personal use cases, unicode is
> irrelevant, and given the opportunity costs and performance hits, a
> negative.

Not unique perhaps, but 'fortunate'?

Whether or not your application's use unicode directly is not the issue 
- beyond direct localization of your interface, a lot of strings come 
into your app from outside sources which you cannot control (of course 
this largely depends on the target of the app - I guess in-house might 
be slight more controllable).

If you have an app that processes arbitrary files on disk, then unless 
you are going to limit your users to Western European languages in their 
choice of filenames then you need unicode (can you really control the 
filenames end users might want to use)?

If you have an app that is customized by user's personal details, then 
unless you are going to force your users to only use Western European 
characters for their name, address etc, then you need unicode.

If you have an app that uses the system date format, then unless you are 
going to force your users to only use a Western European locale setting, 
then you need unicode.

Ultimately anyone who is writing apps for any platform and intends to 
distribute them widely (whether localized or not) really does need 
Unicode support - if only to ensure that any edge-cases (such as unicode 
containing filenames, unicode containing locales and such) don't cause 
your app to break.

-- 
Mark Waddingham ~ mark at livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/
LiveCode: Everyone can create apps