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Mac OS X Mountain Lion First Impressions


muirm

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I've been itching to try out the new Chinese-related features in Mountain Lion, so I upgraded right when I got home today.

The built-in pinyin input method seems greatly improved. It handled long sentences well, and it had no problem with some "popular" words I tried. It also did very well with abbreviated input where you only type the first letter of each syllable (for common words/phrases). Supposedly Apple is auto-updating the database input method so it should stay current between system upgrades. I already uninstalled sougou (remove it from "/Library/Input Methods").

Mountain Lion also ships with a built-in Simplified Chinese dictionary. It is the Chinese-Chinese 现代汉语规范词典, the same one in Pleco except a newer version. You can search by pinyin, simplified, or traditional characters, and while the definitions are only in simplified, it does also provide headwords in traditional. Note that I had to go in to Dictionary.app's preferences to activate the Chinese dictionary before it showed up. I also noticed they changed the "look up the word under my mouse" hotkey to single three-fingered tap (rather than double tap).

There are some other Chinese features related to social media and other online services, but these were the two things I was looking forward to. Anyone else try it out yet?

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Mountain Lion also ships with a built-in Simplified Chinese dictionary. It is the Chinese-Chinese 现代汉语规范词典, the same one in Pleco except a newer version.

If anybody's wondering about the latter, it's explained by the former - tough to compete for licenses with the world's largest company :-) (we have other C-C dictionaries in the pipeline that are newer / bigger, though, and we may yet get the new 规范 too albeit a bit more slowly than Apple)

On the general subject of Mountain Lion, though, aside from the lovely new Pinyin system my favorite Chinese enhancement is the new fonts - along with making the Chinese reading experience much more pleasant out-of-the-box, I'm hopeful that having them around will motivate graphical designers (many of whom use Macs) to stop deploying 黑体 or 宋体 in totally inappropriate places when a design calls for Chinese characters.

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