Friday, July 07, 2006
Macrons - Why the Mac Rocks Over Windows
So I'm adding the finishing touches to an old Latin drill program I wrote using PyObjC (a bridge to the OS X native Cocoa programming platform and descendent of NeXTStep), when I realize how much easier it is to program good software on a Mac. It's all in the simple things, in fact.
Take the challenge of adding macrons over the vowels in Latin words. While real Latin texts don't have macros, teachers use macrons in Latin courses all the time to help students differentiate declension and/or conjugation formats from one another. For example, the word "puella", which is the nominative singular word for girl, can only be differentiated from "puellā", which is ablative singular, by the macron (i.e., little dash above the "a"). Eventually students dispense with macrons - but while they're learning, and doing exercises early on, thindispensablensible.
Hence the challenge for any software program that provides drills on Latin declensions/conjugations.
On Windows, with .NET at least, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to apply macrons over my vowels. I tried combUnicodenicode constants - so sorry, no deal (though this 'theoretically' should have worked). I hard-codingcoding the specific vowels required - not so hot either (I often had to grab the macron directly from a charpaletteallete). Despite a couple of different approaches, macrons were just a pain to deal with on Windows.
On OS X, however, I can just open up the international keyboard settings and use the sequence "alt-a, vowel" to procure a macron-crusted vowel. I can even download a custom keyboard layout that lets me type 'alt-vowel' to make a macron - easy schemesy! (Go to this page to get the layout!)
Now that I can type macrons, and save my source to a UTF-8 encoded format, working with macrons has become so simple. I love it! Three cheers for OS X!
Take the challenge of adding macrons over the vowels in Latin words. While real Latin texts don't have macros, teachers use macrons in Latin courses all the time to help students differentiate declension and/or conjugation formats from one another. For example, the word "puella", which is the nominative singular word for girl, can only be differentiated from "puellā", which is ablative singular, by the macron (i.e., little dash above the "a"). Eventually students dispense with macrons - but while they're learning, and doing exercises early on, thindispensablensible.
Hence the challenge for any software program that provides drills on Latin declensions/conjugations.
On Windows, with .NET at least, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to apply macrons over my vowels. I tried combUnicodenicode constants - so sorry, no deal (though this 'theoretically' should have worked). I hard-codingcoding the specific vowels required - not so hot either (I often had to grab the macron directly from a charpaletteallete). Despite a couple of different approaches, macrons were just a pain to deal with on Windows.
On OS X, however, I can just open up the international keyboard settings and use the sequence "alt-a, vowel" to procure a macron-crusted vowel. I can even download a custom keyboard layout that lets me type 'alt-vowel' to make a macron - easy schemesy! (Go to this page to get the layout!)
Now that I can type macrons, and save my source to a UTF-8 encoded format, working with macrons has become so simple. I love it! Three cheers for OS X!
