Monthly Archives: December 2008

Keyboard shortcuts and mnemonics or accelerators are not the same thing!

Posted on 2008/12/23 by sorin

Over the time I’ve found that there are misunderstandings between the concept of the keyboard shortcuts and mnemonics. I will try to clarify this problem because the differences are important specially from the point of view of software localization.

Posted in Programming | Tagged , , , | Comments Off

Web content, code pages and UTF-8 Unicode encoding

Posted on 2008/12/15 by sorin

If you want to minimize the number of bugs reported for your web application you should know that codepages are domain of the past. If you want to create multi-language web content all you have to remember is that you … Continue reading →

Posted in Input, Readiness, Web | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Are we supposed to localize keyboard shortcuts?

Posted on 2008/12/11 by sorin

When I’m talking about keyboard shortcuts to things like Ctrl-S or even one key shortcuts like ‘A’ (used to Archive an email on Gmail). On the other side the mnemonics, known as hotkeys or the underlined letters in menus or … Continue reading →

Posted in Input, OS X | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Virtual key codes on Apple OS X

Posted on 2008/12/09 by sorin

On Windows, keyboard events are reporting scan codes, virtual key codes and characters. If you want to deal with keyboard shortcuts and be able to use them in an international context you have to use the virtual key codes.

Posted in OS X | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Automation and Unicode text input under Windows

Posted on 2008/12/07 by sorin

If you’ll ever try to use automation for testing globalization readiness on applications you are going to discover that the keyboard input API does not have any function for entering Unicode texts. If you’ll try to use VkKeyScan for converting an Unicode character … Continue reading →

Posted in Windows | 4 Comments