Improving the Mac operating system

In recent months, Apple and Apple developers have announced two interesting new enhancements to the Macintosh operating system which pertain to language, albeit in unrelated ways.

Word Services

Word Services defines a suite of Apple Events which devel opers can use to share access to programs such as dictionaries, spellcheckers, thesauri, hyphenators, grammar checkers, and maybe one day translation programs. Apple Events is a facility of the Macintosh operating system which allows Mac programs to pass messages back and forth to each other. Its equivalent in the Windows world is dynamic data exchange; in OS/2 it is named pipes. The generic term for this relatively new technique is interprocess communication.
    According to a report in MacWeek, Working Software (Santa Cruz, CA, USA), developer of Spellswell, a standalone spellchecker for the Mac, initiated the effort. Major Apple software developers including Aldus, Claris, Deneba, Reference Software, T/Maker, WordPerfect, the WordStar’s Writing Tools Group together with Apple have endorsed and helped further develop the specificiation. It is said to be fairly easy to implement, requiring only four new events and two new properties to be defined in the Apple Events object library.
    If adopted by developers, Word Services would mean that Macintosh wordprocessing tools could become more modular. Users could install, for example, just one single spellchecker in their systems to use with all their programs, instead of the current situation in which even spreadsheets, such as Excel 4.0, have their own embedded spellcheckers, each requiring upwards of a half a megabyte of diskspace and each maintaining separate user dictionaries.

WorldScript

At a developers conference this past May, Apple announced that the next version of its operating system software, version 7.1, scheduled to be released this fall, will include WorldScript, a major extension of the the operating system’s localization and script-handling facilities. The company says that WorldScript is intended to “transform the Macintosh into the first international PC [sic] through worldwide language support.” WorldScript, which was originally intended for version 7.0 but missed the boat, will offer system-level support for non-Roman languages, including both two-byte languages, such as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, and one-byte languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew. WorldScript should make it easier for users to install and use multiple scripts on the Mac. If more than one script or keyboard layout is present, a new keyboard menu is displayed in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, next to the finder icon. Using this menu, users will then be able to switch back and forth between the scripts and keyboard layouts installed in their systems. Apple says WorldScript will also make it much easier for programs to be localized.
    WorldScript apparently frees people and programs from the tyranny of eight-bit character sets, although how this is done and whether Unicode has been implemented is not yet clear as we go to press.