Polyglot Frontier: An International Community

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Polyglot Frontier: promoting multi-lingual support for Frontier

Originally published on 7/23/97; 9:33:52 AM

An International Community

Frontier is being used all day long, all around the world

I came to Japan in the summer of 1994, to teach English in a small country town in the mountains. I intended to stay only a year, but I wound up stay a second year, and a third, and it looks like I will be here for a while longer.
It's been a real pleasure to live in a different country, make friends in a different culture, work in a different language. My peers have been from countries all around the world. Often when we get together I look around the room in amazement--the representation is pretty awesome. Canadians, Japanese, Aussies, Kiwis, Scots, Brits, a Hawaiian (born of Chinese-Polish parents), Koreans...
I try to imagine all the passports in my head.
Then I imagine a globe, with red lines tracing from our hometowns, winding across borders and up into the airplane routes and down again, meeting here in the midst of the mountains and trees and rice fields of rural Japan. All those people, all those cultures, here in one place. What amazing connections. And I can feel the energy pulsing through.
I often feel the same way about using Frontier.
I discovered Frontier when Dave Winer, Frontier's co-author and president of Userland Software, released the "Aretha" beta version of Frontier 4.0 for free in mid 1995. I didn't do more than tinker for a long while, but I loved the environment. It's elegant, smart, and cleanly implemented. It's powerful and empowering. I get lots of work done. But that's not even half the reason I enjoy working in Frontier so much.
I love the amazing sense of connection I feel when working in the Frontier community. Frontier seems to attract the kind of people I enjoy working with.
Since I started working with Frontier, more than once I've felt the hair raising on my neck, the same way it does when I think of all those different passports. But it's not just working across national borders, it's real-time collaboration and debugging across time zones that gets me. I sometimes quite literally receive help from tomorrow. I come home from eating out to find that someone in Montana that morning (an hour before) has found a bug in one of my scripts. I post a message, and someone on the other side of midnight in France sends an answer (20 minutes later).
Watching a conversation grow and build on one of the mailing lists, the scripts being coded, and then seeing the web pages go up... it's an amazing thing. It's the "Web energy" that Dave talks about. When a fog settles in my head and I can't see what to do next, an email will produce the hint, the answer to clear things up. Sometimes it comes with a script attached, and often, it contains a URL to a suite that someone has implemented--exactly what I needed.
International Frontiers
Since I started my own site to promote Frontier and provide suites and sample scripts, I've become even more aware of all the world-wide appeal of Frontier. Mail comes in from all over--Sydney, New York, London, the south of France, Osaka, the Bahamas, Knoxville, Vancouver.
I didn't realize just how amazing this was until I went into my English classroom and talked about it with my students. They were amazed that their teacher wrote and received letters from 5 different countries that morning. It puts studying English into a whole different light for my students.
But it's not just the English speaking world that's using Frontier.
Demo in June
I gave a demonstration of Frontier to a Mac users group in a nearby city in June. A small group of 15 (all guys) huddled around a borrowed 8500 to listen to me explain, in broken Japanese, about the root, UserTalk, OSAMenu and the Finder scripts, and show off basic web building in Frontier.
There were all levels of Mac users there. One guy is an X-ray tech at a local hospital, he runs all the X-rays through a network of Macs. Another guy told of buying and assembling an Apple II, installing a rough patch to make it display Japanese katakana characters, and modifying the keyboard to support Japanese. A couple graphic designers, one Quark Xpress user. One or two AppleScript users. No one had heard of Frontier.
After using Frontier for a while you forget how powerful it makes you. I was reminded by the round eyes that greeted my simple demo of changing file types, cataloging and indexing GIFs and JPEGs with a desktop script (see Web Image Utilities), and generating HTML code.
Everyone was asking:

Does Frontier do Japanese?
Are there any Japanese docs?
The answers
At the time, the answers were: "Sort of (not without problems)" and "No".
But since then, the answers have gotten better.
There is a small but growing core of Japanese Frontier users. They are putting Frontier to work in Japanese, building websites, doing site administration, and creating more Japanese language functionality for Frontier.
Still, they are frustrated by a lack of documentation and support in Japanese, and by weak or insufficent Japanese language support inside Frontier.
The first problem is on the way to being solved. It's impossible to expect Japanese langauge support from the English-speaking community, so some leaders have stepped up to provide support structures. There are several home pages that support Frontier in Japanese, a mailing list started in July 1997, and SOHOvillage.com in Canada hosts a BBS thread dedicated to Frontier.
(you can visit these links from the "resources" page.)
Japanese support inside Frontier.
Frontier has been around for a long time, and thus relies on the old Apple Text Engine for text with its 32k limit and uneven WorldScript support. So doing Japanese (or any other double-byte language) is a chore in Frontier at the moment. (I've compiled and translated some technical explanations of the exact problems).
Hideaki Iimori, a longtime Frontier user, has helped immeasurable with a series of UCMDs that allow use of Japanese in the html suite. Before, Japanese langauge text, macros, and glossaries didn't work at all in Frontier web-building. But now, with Iimori's MultiLingual Web Utilities, it works just fine. According to Iimori, his version is twice as fast as string.processhtmlMacros(), regardless of the text type--roman or Japanese. His version also whimsically codes macro errors in red ("so it's really easy to see", he said). It's brillant stuff--he provides a solution not just for Japanese, but for Korean, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese, as well as ordinary Roman script.
Still, problems remain.
Frontier can't handle Japanese string literals without corrupting certain key characters.
Uneven WorldScript support (because of the Text Engine): It doesn't accept in-line input, and deleting and undoing cut and paste operations leaves stray bytes in the text. (Although is improved from pre-4.1 applications, where a delete would result in a system error).
Frontier doesn't handle international date/time formats; i.e., it returns English language text for dates rather than a numeric based system which can easily be converted to other language systems.
A growing community
The Japanese Frontier community is growing, albeit slowly, especially as Japanese documentation and support structures come on line.
But I don't think the Japanese market for Frontier will grow unless it can handle Japanese text better. Documentation and support will come from the community here, but for robustness handling Japanese text we have to rely on Userland.
I have a vested interest in better support for Japanese in Frontier; I enjoy working with Frontier and can foresee living and working in Japan in a capacity where I could use the power of Frontier to process all kinds of text and file in Japanese.
But it's not just me. There is a real, vibrant market here. Like so many other Mac products, I think Userland will find a strong and loyal following in Japan. Japanese users tend to be enthusiastic supporters of software they love and use--they love their computers and there has always been strong interest in programming and scripting and underlying technology; much more so than the average consumer in the States. And, it's a virtually unpenetrated market--AppleScript is used here, but I think Japanese users would jump at the advantages of Frontier: native scripting environment, persistent data storage, Usertalk, web-building functionality, connections to all their other apps.
But they will only buy in if the Frontier environment lets them speak in their own language.
Making the Connection
But market and technical details aside, I think the attraction for me, for other Frontier users, and possibly for UserLand software, is the potential to hook up and connect with the bundle of creativity that is alive and humming in the Japanese computer market (particularly the Mac market here). Some things will get lost in the translation of course, but I think that both sides have much to gain from each other. The communities are already there-- they exist. It's just a matter of bringing them together.
I hope this site is a step towards making that connection.
Phil Suh
Tue, Aug 5, 1997 at 1:47:24 PM

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Originally published on 7/23/97; 9:33:52 AM An International Community Frontier is being used all day long, all around the world
	I came to Japan in the summer of 1994, to teach English in a small country town in the mountains. I intended to stay only a year, but I wound up stay a second year, and a third, and it looks like I will be here for a while longer. It's been a real pleasure to live in a different country, make friends in a different culture, work in a different language. My peers have been from countries all around the world. Often when we get together I look around the room in amazement--the representation is pretty awesome. Canadians, Japanese, Aussies, Kiwis, Scots, Brits, a Hawaiian (born of Chinese-Polish parents), Koreans... I try to imagine all the passports in my head. Then I imagine a globe, with red lines tracing from our hometowns, winding across borders and up into the airplane routes and down again, meeting here in the midst of the mountains and trees and rice fields of rural Japan. All those people, all those cultures, here in one place. What amazing connections. And I can feel the energy pulsing through. I often feel the same way about using Frontier. I discovered Frontier when Dave Winer, Frontier's co-author and president of Userland Software, released the "Aretha" beta version of Frontier 4.0 for free in mid 1995. I didn't do more than tinker for a long while, but I loved the environment. It's elegant, smart, and cleanly implemented. It's powerful and empowering. I get lots of work done. But that's not even half the reason I enjoy working in Frontier so much. I love the amazing sense of connection I feel when working in the Frontier community. Frontier seems to attract the kind of people I enjoy working with. Since I started working with Frontier, more than once I've felt the hair raising on my neck, the same way it does when I think of all those different passports. But it's not just working across national borders, it's real-time collaboration and debugging across time zones that gets me. I sometimes quite literally receive help from tomorrow. I come home from eating out to find that someone in Montana that morning (an hour before) has found a bug in one of my scripts. I post a message, and someone on the other side of midnight in France sends an answer (20 minutes later). Watching a conversation grow and build on one of the mailing lists, the scripts being coded, and then seeing the web pages go up... it's an amazing thing. It's the "Web energy" that Dave talks about. When a fog settles in my head and I can't see what to do next, an email will produce the hint, the answer to clear things up. Sometimes it comes with a script attached, and often, it contains a URL to a suite that someone has implemented--exactly what I needed. International Frontiers Since I started my own site to promote Frontier and provide suites and sample scripts, I've become even more aware of all the world-wide appeal of Frontier. Mail comes in from all over--Sydney, New York, London, the south of France, Osaka, the Bahamas, Knoxville, Vancouver. I didn't realize just how amazing this was until I went into my English classroom and talked about it with my students. They were amazed that their teacher wrote and received letters from 5 different countries that morning. It puts studying English into a whole different light for my students. But it's not just the English speaking world that's using Frontier. Demo in June I gave a demonstration of Frontier to a Mac users group in a nearby city in June. A small group of 15 (all guys) huddled around a borrowed 8500 to listen to me explain, in broken Japanese, about the root, UserTalk, OSAMenu and the Finder scripts, and show off basic web building in Frontier. There were all levels of Mac users there. One guy is an X-ray tech at a local hospital, he runs all the X-rays through a network of Macs. Another guy told of buying and assembling an Apple II, installing a rough patch to make it display Japanese katakana characters, and modifying the keyboard to support Japanese. A couple graphic designers, one Quark Xpress user. One or two AppleScript users. No one had heard of Frontier. After using Frontier for a while you forget how powerful it makes you. I was reminded by the round eyes that greeted my simple demo of changing file types, cataloging and indexing GIFs and JPEGs with a desktop script (see Web Image Utilities), and generating HTML code. Everyone was asking: Does Frontier do Japanese? Are there any Japanese docs? The answers At the time, the answers were: "Sort of (not without problems)" and "No". But since then, the answers have gotten better. There is a small but growing core of Japanese Frontier users. They are putting Frontier to work in Japanese, building websites, doing site administration, and creating more Japanese language functionality for Frontier. Still, they are frustrated by a lack of documentation and support in Japanese, and by weak or insufficent Japanese language support inside Frontier. The first problem is on the way to being solved. It's impossible to expect Japanese langauge support from the English-speaking community, so some leaders have stepped up to provide support structures. There are several home pages that support Frontier in Japanese, a mailing list started in July 1997, and SOHOvillage.com in Canada hosts a BBS thread dedicated to Frontier. (you can visit these links from the "resources" page.) Japanese support inside Frontier. Frontier has been around for a long time, and thus relies on the old Apple Text Engine for text with its 32k limit and uneven WorldScript support. So doing Japanese (or any other double-byte language) is a chore in Frontier at the moment. (I've compiled and translated some technical explanations of the exact problems). Hideaki Iimori, a longtime Frontier user, has helped immeasurable with a series of UCMDs that allow use of Japanese in the html suite. Before, Japanese langauge text, macros, and glossaries didn't work at all in Frontier web-building. But now, with Iimori's MultiLingual Web Utilities, it works just fine. According to Iimori, his version is twice as fast as string.processhtmlMacros(), regardless of the text type--roman or Japanese. His version also whimsically codes macro errors in red ("so it's really easy to see", he said). It's brillant stuff--he provides a solution not just for Japanese, but for Korean, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese, as well as ordinary Roman script. Still, problems remain. Frontier can't handle Japanese string literals without corrupting certain key characters. Uneven WorldScript support (because of the Text Engine): It doesn't accept in-line input, and deleting and undoing cut and paste operations leaves stray bytes in the text. (Although is improved from pre-4.1 applications, where a delete would result in a system error). Frontier doesn't handle international date/time formats; i.e., it returns English language text for dates rather than a numeric based system which can easily be converted to other language systems. A growing community The Japanese Frontier community is growing, albeit slowly, especially as Japanese documentation and support structures come on line. But I don't think the Japanese market for Frontier will grow unless it can handle Japanese text better. Documentation and support will come from the community here, but for robustness handling Japanese text we have to rely on Userland. I have a vested interest in better support for Japanese in Frontier; I enjoy working with Frontier and can foresee living and working in Japan in a capacity where I could use the power of Frontier to process all kinds of text and file in Japanese. But it's not just me. There is a real, vibrant market here. Like so many other Mac products, I think Userland will find a strong and loyal following in Japan. Japanese users tend to be enthusiastic supporters of software they love and use--they love their computers and there has always been strong interest in programming and scripting and underlying technology; much more so than the average consumer in the States. And, it's a virtually unpenetrated market--AppleScript is used here, but I think Japanese users would jump at the advantages of Frontier: native scripting environment, persistent data storage, Usertalk, web-building functionality, connections to all their other apps. But they will only buy in if the Frontier environment lets them speak in their own language. Making the Connection But market and technical details aside, I think the attraction for me, for other Frontier users, and possibly for UserLand software, is the potential to hook up and connect with the bundle of creativity that is alive and humming in the Japanese computer market (particularly the Mac market here). Some things will get lost in the translation of course, but I think that both sides have much to gain from each other. The communities are already there-- they exist. It's just a matter of bringing them together. I hope this site is a step towards making that connection. Phil Suh Tue, Aug 5, 1997 at 1:47:24 PM
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