One problem that makes it difficult to quickly and efficiently enter large numbers of vocabulary directly into flashcard software if you are dealing with non-Roman languages is the fact that the user has to keep switching the keyboard input back and forth between English and the other language, whatever it may be. This is a problem for all the flashcard applications I have seen so far, with the exception with some older versions of iFlash.
I’m wondering if this is a completely insurmountable programming problem in OS X or if perhaps the Cocoa programming API does offer some way of overcoming this issue.
Today I found this in the reference for the NSTextFieldCell class:
setAllowedInputSourceLocales – Sets an array of locale identifiers representing input sources that are allowed to be enabled when the receiver has the keyboard focus.
allowedInputSourceLocales – Returns an array of locale identifiers representing input sources that are allowed to be enabled when the receiver has the keyboard focus.
I don’t know much about Cocoa programming but I wonder if these two things (OS X 10.5) or something similar can be used to help remedy the problem?
Also, programmers might want to read over this posting about keyboard events and non-Roman languages.
2 Comments
The QIM input method for Chinese allows you to toggle languages by using the Caps-Lock key. I find this very convenient when I’m switching back and forth a lot.
That is true, also I have had some buggy behavior by QIM with the caps-lock. It sometimes gets “stuck” in the English mode and I have to exit the application and come back in and fiddle with things before Chinese suddenly works again. This happens most often when I’m working in a document where I’m switching between QIM (English & Chinese) and Korean.