Would you believe that Photoshop doesn't support right-to-left typing? I had to make this in Microsoft Word.

Would you believe that Photoshop doesn't support right-to-left typing? I had to make this in Microsoft Word.

For the past 10 months, I’ve used an iPod Touch to synchronize my mobile life with my computer here in Jordan. I picked it up a few days before leaving for Jordan because I didn’t want to pay AT&T the ludicrous sum of $80 a month for a phone that wouldn’t even work properly overseas without doing something called “unlocking” it. I may be a tech person but I tend to avoid phone tech like the plague so this was news to me. So I kept using my aging Motorola Razr V3, and still use here in Jordan now, but the iPod does everything else. Music, email, calendar, photos, and most importantly, a single file in the “Notes” section of the iPod that I’ve simply titled “Jorabic Words.”

This file contains approximately 300-400 tiny lines of text that I’ve recorded throughout my time here, adding a new line whenever I hear an important word and happen to have an Arab nearby to tell me what it means and how important it is. If I scroll back down through it, the first word is…let’s see here…ah, here it is, at the bottom: “fathi” which means “empty.” But therein lies the problem – I wrote it just like that, without the actual Arabic accenting and pronunciation, because that was all I could do. Until 1.5 weeks ago, your iPhone or iPod could not handle any of the right-to-left Semitic languages, like Arabic or Hebrew.

Now, for most people this is a non-issue, and I’ll admit that I’m one of those people. But it was the single largest annoyance ever that I had with my favorite electronic handheld device, even more than the glitch 5 months ago that made the date and time reset every time I plugged it into a computer so I lost all my appointments and alarm clocks, and I had a dim view of that one after missing my carpool to work a few times.

What really burned me was that Apple had the nerve to market a device, in the Arab world, the Umma, without adding Arabic language support to it. It’s only either the 5th or 6th most widely spoken language in the world, guys.* How can you sell a phone to a region and it is literally impossible to input the native language on it, and when it comes to outputting it from a website or something, it’s completely broken up and segmented, which is actually harder to read for a poor guy like me who has enough trouble as it is putting the letters together into pronounceable words.

What is this, Apple? You can handle Chinese, which is right-left AND up-down, but not Arabic?

What is this, Apple? You can handle Chinese, which is right-left AND up-down, but not Arabic?

Sure, Apple may argue (if they cared) that anyone who can afford an iPhone in the Arab world can probably speak English and they’d probably be right, too. But what about the people who just need it to communicate, or read articles or news that might only be available in a particular language? For example, I email Ahmad’s older brother, Majid, all the time with short messages in Arabic from my laptop, but I can’t do that from my iPod, I either have to drag out the ‘top or call him and attempt to use my mangled language skills to communicate with him. I’m sure there are hundreds of Arab businessmen and Expats all over the Arab world who need to do the same thing, daily, and Apple just smirks and then partners with Orange (worthless excuse for a Telecom provider that it is) to release a crippled smartphone.

But now the OS 3.0 software has been released, and after I coughed up my $9.95 for the software update, all has been forgiven on that front. The iPod now perfectly displays and connects Arabic text, and allows me to input not just the letters, but all of the various symbols (َ ِ ً ٍ ْ ُ  ٌ) for pronunciation above and below the letters. I have no idea how to use them, of course – I don’t speak or write the proper, “Qur’anic” or “Fuhsah” Arabic, but the stunted street Arabic that the average speaks and writes to get their point across without having to perfectly dot out hundreds of tiny little lines and squiggles next to the letters. That’s why I titled the file as “Jorabic” instead of Arabic – the regional differences mean that probably a good 20-30 percent of the words I’ve recorded there would be useless in Morocco. However, next time you’re a bookstore, pick up a copy of the Arabic Qur’an and look inside it. See all the tiny little doodads above and below the thicker squiggles? That’s “Fuhsah,” which might as well be a second language to me, and frankly, it is one.

إسمي زاكاري هايزي - My Name is Zachary Heise. At last!

إسمي زاكاري هايزي - My Name is Zachary Heise. At last!

So that’s my main “Review” of the iPhone/iPod 3.0 software, because this firmware has already been beaten to death like a horse with reviews and the Internet is running out of room. However, one thing that people don’t talk about is the speed of the update when it’s put on different Apple devices, unfortunately. Most of the reviews you’re likely to come across are for the latest and greatest iPods and iPhones, but I’m running everything on a First Generation iPod Touch – the one without the speaker – and with the slowest processor of them all, running a 412 Megahertz compared with the later gen’s 533 MHz system. So for all you other old-school iPod users out there, be forewarned – some things are going to be a little slow on this new update. The new “Spotlight” search function, for example, has a definite lag when inputting text (in either language, I found, but more so for Arabic) and when performing the search. Also, the cute little “ripple” effect that Apple uses to close/minimize a running Application disappears about 70% of the time now when exiting an App, just causing the App to unceremoniously dump me back at the home screen – a sure sign of a crash-quit instead of a proper close. I wish I knew more about how Apple’s internal indexing program worked for “Spotlight” on the iPhone – is it like on OS X and Vista, which has a database, or does the iDevice actually rescan the whole little 8GB/16GB drive whenever it searches? I wish I had more information on this.

One final note which has bugged me since the 1.0 firmware days: Notes Synchronization – or rather the lack thereof in Apple’s case. As you can imagine, that little “Jorabic Words” file is pretty important to me. It’d be good to know that I had a easy backup of it if something happened to my iPod. Supposedly in OS X, that ability has been built in for awhile, but us Windows users have been left in the dust – until now. 3.0 supposedly brings this to Windows as well, but guess what – it requires the usage of Microsoft Outlook’s email program in order to work! Email?!? Apple, my notes have nothing to do with email besides both being made of text! Why should I have to run Microsoft’s bloated email program to access a few .txt files? For that matter, why do I have to use Outlook to sync my calendar? Or my contacts? Or my mail files? And why do I need to use Internet Explorer to sync my favorites/bookmarks? Apple, this company is supposed to be your competitor! I still am baffled as to why Apple wouldn’t put support in for the 2nd most widely used browser in the world, Mozilla Firefox, and the Mozilla company’s email client, Thunderbird (and Calendar client, Sunbird) – it just seems ridiculous that a company who constantly and annoyingly mocks Microsoft’s products would then allow their Windows customers to only use Microsoft products to work with their iDevices.

Here’s how it should be, Apple, Oh Masters Of “It Just Works”:

  1. Specify folder in iTunes for synchronization: Let’s say, C:\Desktop\Notes
  2. Click Apply.
  3. Boom. Any .txt file written and saved in that folder will automatically be uploaded to your iDevice, and any “Note” created on the iDevice will be updated and transferred into that folder as a .txt file. That’s it.

I didn’t include steps like 4. Uninstall Outlook off your computer where it’s been taking up space since you installed the Microsoft Office suite, and 5. Call Apple up and complain to their perpetually-surprised sounding tech support about why they keep doing things like this. I’ve called them about 9 times while I’ve been here in Jordan, and they always sound baffled that someone “would want to do that” with the company’s products. They never say it, but I can tell they’re thinking, “Why can’t you just use Outlook and our MobileMe service like a normal customer?” Read the link over there on the right for my feelings on the “service” that Apple provides with MobileMe.

That’s my compromise. A competitor would have to come out with a pretty solid contender to get me to consider switching from my iPod to a different PDA, but that just means that Apple can expect to hear from me every couple weeks about their numbskullish software barricades that seem to go out of their way to hinder a customer’s productivity and options.

*This is according to Wikipedia and a few other sources around the web, which rate Arabic as between the seventh through fifth most spoken language in the world. Exact numbers aren’t important – but it’s definitely greater numbers than say, French or Japanese, which the iPhone has supported since day one.