Kickstarter 2013 Revisited

[Geoff Canyon]

Again, maybe I'm unusual, but none of these apply to any of the apps I've
ever written. I've done consulting work (oh so long ago) on apps that
stored people's names, and likely unicode comes in handy for those, but I
haven't asked the authors whether they take advantage of it.

I'm not arguing against unicode, since I really don't know. The impression
I get is that there has been a huge opportunity cost of implementing it,
and on the list I've seen far more people complain about it than praise it.

On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 3:02 AM, Mark Waddingham <mark at livecode.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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