2012-02-21

Mr. Invalid Character

Introduction


I finally received new laptop at work. It's a brand new MacBook Pro. It should not be very surprising that one of the first things I wanted to install (and try out) was XCode. The only problem is, XCode is available through App Store. Therefore I had to create an Apple ID.

To be honest, I wasn't expecting so many internationalization defects in such a simple application. I thought it is not that hard to create simple registration form... Well, I was wrong.

Birth Date


The first thing that caught my eyes was birth date selection. I don't know why Apple needs to know my birth date in the first place, but that's not the worst part.

The worst part is, they assume everybody uses Gregorian calendar. I am not so sure if I knew my Gregorian birth date, if I were Russian (for example).

Another issue is, rather then simply enter the day, they force me to choose it from a drop-down. With 31 items, it is not too easy to select the right one and to be honest, I really dislike it. Apple is known for their Usability, but to me this is clearly a mistake.

Billing Address


For no apparent reason, Apple requires billing address, even if I select "None" as a payment method:


I wouldn't care so much but their registration form is full of i18n defects.

The first thing you might notice is title. It is required. You want see it on the screenshot, but there are only few title you can select. This is wrong, as titles surely depend on the culture. Personally, I prefer no title at all and I feel a bit offended if somebody call me this way.

Another thing, it seems that only ASCII characters are accepted in Personal Name fields and Address fields. Dear Apple, my name is Paweł. Like it or not, this is my name. And I don't want it transcribed into Latin alphabet.
The street name, where I work also contains Polish diacritics. It is very interesting idea to expect street names would be written in Latin all over the world.

Last, but not least: Apple expects everyone to have a first name and the last name. The problem is, this also depends on the culture.

That's all folks.

Thank you for registering, Mr. Invalid Character!

2 comments:

  1. That's not the worst part Pawel, try ordering something via estore, then go to track your order and switch language od the UI using their dropdown into Polish. You'll have UI translated into 3 languages: some parts in Polish, some in Italian and some in Hungarian! That's Pro.

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  2. In Russia Julian calendar was dropped prior to Gregorian calendar in 1918, so I think it is not a big deal to find out what to write in birthdate graph.

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