“When Yinon Yamin bought his iPod last summer, he was as infatuated with the small music player as the next user — but with one significant difference. The Israeli university student soon discovered, to his great frustration, that the high-tech player had a major deficiency: Download a Hebrew-language pop song with its information written in Hebrew, and the corresponding song title on the iPod would come up blank. The problem made finding certain songs difficult. ‘Nothing would come up. Only the English captions were displayed,’ he recounts,” Carolynne Wheeler reports for The Globe and Mail. “So it seemed only natural for this computer science student to help his player learn to read his mother tongue.”
“Mr. Yamin’s version is a simple program that takes less than 15 minutes to download and install. It was quickly embraced and got a few thousand hits within days. A first part to the program adds Hebrew fonts to the iPod; a second part allows text to be typed and read from right to left, instead of the left-to-right used in English. It was also closest to what Apple’s Israeli designers were already working on, and a deal was struck within two weeks of the program’s posting on Mr. Yamin’s website. After some debugging and upgrading, the Hebrew-language patch was made available through Apple’s Hebrew-language site last fall. It has been widely received since. ‘I didn’t want to make money off this program, so I spread it free, and when I gave it to them I told them to spread the software for free, that was one of my conditions,’ said Mr. Yamin, who added that he wasn’t paid extravagantly for the program,” Wheeler reports.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Michael K.” for the heads up.]
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