8 ms·

Apple Removes Flag Icons in Monterey 12.4

49 points by ericmay 4y ago

For those of you who enjoyed having a flag icon on your menu bar by using the keyboard input work-around, Apple has replaced the beautiful flag icons with two-letter icons. This makes the Mac less fun, less colorful, and less enjoyable to use. For true international users (not those of us just using it to display something pretty) it'll be harder to tell what language you are using because flags are easier to identify than gray text. Bad UI move Apple.

rcarmo 4y ago
Actually, as someone who switches between US and PT layouts several times a day, I find the little flag an annoying RGB eyesore on an otherwise pristine monochrome menu bar. GNOME also uses letters (and Windows), so I’m fine with that.
I_dev_outdoors 4y ago
Having a flag displayed isn't apparently worth dealing with the controversy. Decisions like this make me feel like software isn't really designed for people.
- andybak 4y ago
  Surely "avoiding controversy" or otherwise is exactly what's involved in designing for people? Controversy is intrinsically a human issue so I'm not sure I get your point.
- praestigiare 4y ago
  I'm not disagreeing with you, but it's funny because being designed for people is exactly why there is controversy.
bombcar 4y ago
I don't really see how having "EN" instead of a US or UK or whatever flag is really going to make people happier or sadder.
- OJFord 4y ago
  Tbh when I used a Mac I did think it looked oddly inconsistent that it was the only colour in the status bar. And as evidenced by OP some people obviously liked that, it's a change, of course some will like and some will not (and others will be indifferent).
  - mantas 4y ago
    It makes it much easier to tell which layout is active.
    - OJFord 4y ago
      Specifically that it's in colour? Sure, if you have two layouts with very similar flags I suppose.
      - mantas 4y ago
        It's easier to find the icon because it stands out being colorful. And languages I use have very different flags. So it was super easy to tell which one is active. Now the keyboard icon is lost in menu bar and it's hard to tell languages apart.
- akersten 4y ago
  Out of the corner of my eye I can see if my keyboard is in US mode (red/white/blue) or Spanish (yellow/red). Can't do that now, need to actually move my eyes to the corner of the screen to read low contrast grayscale ES or EN. Horrible UI regression.
  - kzrdude 4y ago
    Some kind of visual cue would be good - but what's the solution - another set of icons, color coding, or what? Maybe black for system default and other bright colors for the remaining choices.
  - bombcar 4y ago
ceejayoz 4y ago
The Unicode Consortium has indicated they won't accept new flags as emoji. https://www.engadget.com/unicode-no-flag-emoji-please-131509128.html https://www.engadget.com/unicode-no-flag-emoji-please-131509... Given this, it's a sensible move; it won't be long before the available set no longer reflects the full set of countries.
- OJFord 4y ago
  Related issue I hadn't thought of before: what happens if the flag is changed? Suppose it partly depends if the unicode description is 'flag of the country blah' or blazon-style description of what it looks like.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    Font vendors update their fonts, I'd guess.
    - corrral 4y ago
      Not great that a historical usage of the older flag would start rendering as the new one. Maybe Unicode needs to incorporate a date into each glyph /s
  - sharikous 4y ago
    The Afghan flag has this exact problem now. Plus the political issue of recognizing or not the Taliban government
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - cabirum 4y ago
    Unicode supports alternate character styles and combining characters, they can be used to refer to specific flag "versions"
- matthewmacleod 4y ago
tyoma 4y ago
I am going to assume this has something to do with China/Taiwan/Hong Kong since that is the only market that is both big enough to force the change and where the political leadership is very sensitive about flag/name/border issues.
- jfzoid 4y ago
  doubt it -- see my comment about how Chinese inputs are not using flags in Big Sur
egorfine 4y ago
In Ukraine this matters for a lot of people. Half if not the majority of ukrainians are russian-speaking and confusing russian language with russia is not something we like.
- akersten 4y ago
  What I don't understand is why Apple cannot simply make this a toggle option in settings somewhere. No, it has to work one way and one way only...
  - widowlark 4y ago
    Isn't that how Apple operates with everything in every instance?
    - kergonath 4y ago
      There are plenty of boxes to check or uncheck in the system preferences, so no, this is not how “Apple operates with everything in every instance”.
      - GekkePrutser 4y ago
        Compare it to other OSes and you will see that 'plenty' is not actually a lot in this case. I really was thrilled when I finally moved over to KDE from macOS. Over the years they had forced a number of changes I was really unhappy with. Like the inability to put virtual desktops in a grid, among others, that was pulled somewhere around 10.9 or so. It turned out that KDE just offers this and most of my other annoyances with options. You want them in a line, you want them in a grid? Whatever you please. Also, choose what kind of transition, how you'd like to identify which one is active, etc etc. Everything can be configured. You can even name them if you like. It's really amazing being able to set everything up the way I need it again. Apple had an OK baseline for me around the Tiger/Lion era, but after this they started going downhill. Launchpad, Mission Control etc were all regressions from the previous options like Expose. Also moving to ever lower-density UIs that mimic mobile devices (without actually offering touch support that necessitates bigger buttons) really annoyed me. Very happy with the choice and the Qt-based FOSS software is similarly better than Apple's for the same reasons. Many configuration options and choices.
vehemenz 4y ago
I 100% applaud this. I've always used ABC Extended because I thought a flag in the system menu was gaudy and weirdly nationalistic. I know I live in the US and use the American English keyboard layout. Similarly, I don't need a Chinese flag every time I switch to a Chinese keyboard.
- alex_sf 4y ago
  What's wrong with nationalism? Do you also think supporting your local community is weird?
  - shuckles 4y ago
    The specific claim was weirdly nationalistic, which seems reasonable since lots of users outside America use the “American English” keyboard layout, to the point where it’s not clear why that’s the right signifier. Probably more Indian users use that layout than Americans.
  - drcongo 4y ago
    - Veen 4y ago
      > You know countries are just made up right? So are flags, programming languages, natural languages, genders, political parties, ideologies, religions, racial categories, and about a million other things people care deeply about. Dismissing human constructs as "made up" and therefore irrelevant betrays a complete lack of understanding about how human beings operate.
      - drcongo 4y ago
        No it doesn't. Just because people do start wars over most of those things doesn't mean they should. It only takes a little shift to a less insular perspective to realise that the world doesn't have to be that way.
pengaru 4y ago
- klodolph 4y ago
  Was there ever a Taiwanese or Chinese flag there? I’m using an older version of the OS and I see tons of Chinese input methods, but none of them are associated with flags (which wouldn’t make sense to me anyway). Same as Japanese. Japanese is a near perfect correspondence between language and national identity, but none of the Japanese input methods use a flag. This doesn’t seem like it would be related to China or Taiwan in any way.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  The problem isn't Apple. The Taiwan question is not something that should (or can) be dealt with by corporations - it is something to be solved by politicians and governments. China demands suppressing everything that even hints of Taiwan not being an independent country, even outside of its borders? Fine, sanction them to hell and beyond.
jfzoid 4y ago
In Big Sur Apple was using a mix of flags and other icons. The flags seem to be for countries that use the Latin alphabet. Playing around with the Keyboard Preferences, I've found: Different Chinese inputs use different sinograms: the one for Pinyin uses the symbol for "Pin" all Hebrew inputs use the Hebrew letter aleph all Korean inputs use the same Korean symbol all Thai inputs use the same Thai symbol all Arabic inputs use the same Arabic symbol Greek uses a lambda for one input and an epsilon for the other Russian curiously uses a Russian flag and not a Cyrillic letter
samrolken 4y ago
This is ultimately a good move, and matches trends and emerging best practices on the web and elsewhere. Some countries have more than one language. Some languages have more than one country. And the political implications of all of this all mixed in.
- kergonath 4y ago
  > This is ultimately a good move, and matches trends and emerging best practices on the web and elsewhere. It solves some issues and creates others. Icons are more helpful than words in the menu bar, particularly as it gets more monochrome. And the complete confusion between buttons that look like text, links, actual buttons, and weird typography we find on the web is not exactly a good model to emulate. I really would not call that “best practices”, as they are responsible for a significant worsening of the UX on all mainstream platforms.
  - samrolken 4y ago
    In general, the vast majority of UI elements are labeled with text instead of pictures, and have been for a long time. (Other issues with UI notwithstanding.)
richiebful1 4y ago
I have a feeling the Russian invasion of Ukraine has something to do with this. As a Russian speaker in the US, I've already had some weird conversations with coworkers because of the Russian flag as a keyboard indicator. Obviously this is a minor inconvenience for me, but it seems outmoded to attach a language/keyboard layout to a national flag
strict9 4y ago
Flags are not the way to define a language preference. This design decision assumes 1:1 parity with flag and language which is just not true. This move makes language preferences less ambiguous or potentially less offensive and I applaud Apple for doing it.
- elldoubleyew 4y ago
  Note that for many languages a flag is not displayed rather a symbol. Chinese languages in particular follow this (拼 for simplified pinyin, 注 for traditional zhuyin). Also Japanese never displayed a flag (あ for hiragana, ア for katakana). I think it's better to follow this convention.
  - _moof 4y ago
    Arabic as well. Loads of examples of such languages, with huge numbers of speakers. I think this is a reasonable change (and always found the colored icon in the menu bar to be gaudy anyway).
- SllX 4y ago
  Counterpoint: these weren’t necessarily language-specific but country-specific or sometimes dialect-specific or writing system-specific (Hiragana, Katakana, Romaji) or just plain alternative (DVORAK) input methods. My main keyboard input method is not “English” but “U.S.”, and it is one of 15 English-language keyboard input methods available in the Keyboard Input Sources pane. Since I have it set to US most of the time, I kept it in my menubar for the the last 16 years specifically so I could have a nice American flag icon up top in addition to a way to switch between keyboard input sources using the mouse. This change was unnecessary and doesn’t do anything to make the input sources less offensive, but merely removes some of the cultural flavor available out of the box.
- kergonath 4y ago
  There’s an easy way out: just make it a choice, like for the user menu.
  - 4y ago
matthewmacleod 4y ago
I mean this seems broadly more sensible as a default option – it's quite hard to create a clear mapping between "keyboard layout" and "national flag". If you would like to add a flag of some kind to the menu bar anyway, I'm sure it would be very straightforward to whip up a little application to add whatever icon you want up there!
leipert 4y ago
Flags are not languages: http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-represent-language/ http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-re... Arguably it makes a little more sense for keyboard layouts, but even then. Edit: also with alternative layouts. Is Dvorak English? If you want you can create your own keyboard layout with Ukulele https://software.sil.org/ukelele/ https://software.sil.org/ukelele/ (or edit an existing one) and change the icon to any image.
- layer8 4y ago
  Two-letter icons also don’t help with alternative layouts. Flags are useful for e.g. US English vs. UK English, but are bad when a country has more than one official/widely-used language (e.g. Canada) or when multiple countries share the same keyboard language and layout.
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    I was curious how Apple handled this for Canada, IMO their (previous?) solution seems reasonable enough: https://i.postimg.cc/SsT0Tsgs/Screen-Shot-2022-05-26-at-11-40-52-AM.png https://i.postimg.cc/SsT0Tsgs/Screen-Shot-2022-05-26-at-11-4...
  - mayoff 4y ago
    It doesn't just use two-letter icons. The Arabic layouts show “ع”. The Hebrew layouts show “א‎”. The Greek layout shows “λ”. The Thai layouts show “ก”. The Canadian English layout shows “CA”, the French layout shows “FR”, the Canadian French layout shows “CA” above “CSA”, and the Swiss French layout shows “CH” above “FR”.
klodolph 4y ago
To be honest flags should never have been used to indicate language / keyboard layout / input method. It may be “fun” but these things only loosely correspond. None of the input methods I use ever used flags anyway.
anentropic 4y ago
Surely a flag (country symbol) is the wrong identifier for a language though? There is a many-to-many relation between countries and languages, so flag for language is a bad UI choice.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  It is but it has become a standard over time. People know what it means. There are many cultural and language things that make zero sense but just became that way.
  - fomine3 4y ago
    How is it standard?
devit 4y ago
What? Surely it's much easier to tell a language by specifying it's two-letter code rather than a "flag" that may identify a country if you remember it, and which has nothing to do with a language
Wowfunhappy 4y ago
Did Apple merely change the language selection UI, or did they also remove flags from their emoji font? OP only mentions the former, but many replies seem to be referencing the latter.
- ericmay 4y ago
  I've only noticed this in the language selection UI for keyboard input, but not for emoji.
Mizza 4y ago
This might be for political reasons. MS removed all flag emojis entirely in Windows 10, likely because of that island where all of our GPUs get manufactured, or the open air prison next to where our military surplus gets sent to.
r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
Except flags are a terrible way of identifying a language. Many (most?) countries have multiple official languages, and most languages are spoken in more than one country, so there is not a one to one mapping between flags and languages. And that's not even getting into the political side.
layer8 4y ago
Incidentally, that’s how Windows has been indicating keyboard input language in the taskbar all along.
peacefulhat 4y ago
It sucks for me because the flags were how I knew which language I’m in when I switch between English and Asian languages. Now they all look the same out of the corner of my eye and I reflexively toggle the language when I don’t need to.
_moof 4y ago
If you want a flag in your menubar that bad, take the long weekend to learn a little macOS programming. IIRC the API you'll want is NSStatusBar. (That might be outdated info, but hey, that's part of the fun.)
e38383 4y ago
I haven’t used a second layout in some time, but thanks for a clear indication and gering rid of these stupid icons which never made any sense to me. And they were way harder to decode.
malauxyeux 4y ago
The flags led to a tense discussion with my boss once. At my first office job in Canada, I was given a Mac. I activated US QWERTY for programming and CSA to be able to write messages with French accents. One day not long after, I'm programming with US QWERTY enabled – US flag in the menu bar – and my boss comes up behind me, points, and says, "What ... is ... that ... ?" It felt like it took forever to convince him that the flag just signified that I was using a particular keyboard layout and that it didn't mean anything else – to me, anyway. All completely avoidable. For better or worse, people assign a lot of meaning to flags. I can see why it's sensible to avoid using them for something benign like keyboard layout.
- mcphage 4y ago
  ...what did he think it meant?
  - malauxyeux 4y ago
    I didn't ask as I was pretty new at that point. I assume he thought I'd put it there to show political allegiance or something like that.
aeyes 4y ago
I would say that I am a true international user with 3 layouts. I just use the control-space keyboard shortcut, I get a big popup in the middle of the screen showing the currently selected keyboard map.
- abdusco 4y ago
  I'm not getting a large popup. How do you get it to show up? I've been using this shortcut[0] to switch between input layouts. Before realizing that I could set a shortcut for it, I used this utility[1] + Alfred for it. This is still quite useful if you want to switch to a specific keyboard layout. [0]: https://i.imgur.com/urcqU1i.png https://i.imgur.com/urcqU1i.png [1]: https://github.com/myshov/xkbswitch-macosx https://github.com/myshov/xkbswitch-macosx
  - aeyes 4y ago
    I didn't change any setting related to this and it has always been there. Like I said, the default shortcut is Control-Space. Here is a thread with a screenshot and some users saying that the popup not working might be related to having the shortcut mapped to do something else: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3045492 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3045492
    - abdusco 4y ago
      Oh, I needed to enable the shortcut. It's working now. https://i.imgur.com/mkuqSlw.png https://i.imgur.com/mkuqSlw.png
kergonath 4y ago
> For true international users (not those of us just using it to display something pretty) it'll be harder to tell what language you are using because flags are easier to identify than gray text. Indeed. That is a pain in the backside…
qgin 4y ago
Latin American Spanish already has been living in the future with this one. There was no way to pick a flag for that.
dragonwriter 4y ago
It has been said that a language is a dialect with a flag and an army, but, really, the correspondence between flags and languages is not great, and the use of flags to represent language choices has always been placing pretty above useful in a way which is worse the more diverse your international market is.
jfengel 4y ago
ATMs in the EU have apparently started to use the Irish flag for English. Brexit removed the UK from the EU, and Ireland is the only EU country with English as its primary language. Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/ezsjhj/all_atms_in_brussels_been_updated_to_this_lads_ye/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/ezsjhj/all_atms_in... I suspect the Irish aren't much happy about being the symbol for "English", either. So... removing flags seems like a fine idea. They make so much sense in the common case, but there are enough corner cases to ditch the whole thing.
- jchw 4y ago
  OK… but this is keyboard layouts. There is in fact a United Kingdom keyboard layout, which has little to do with geopolitics. I will venture to guess it would turn into the letters “UK” in this case.
- _abox 4y ago
  > Ireland is the only EU country with English as its primary language. Speaking of politically correct, I can imagine some people from the gaeltacht would not approve of the description of English as the primary language in Ireland. The good thing about flags is that they are visual icons. Country codes are usually in English and our script. How would this work in countries that can't read that? Or people visiting an ATM in e.g. an Arab country and having to find which option is "English" in Arabic. This is where flags really shine.
jchw 4y ago
A lot of people are pointing out that flags are not 1:1 with layouts. (Not languages people; languages and layouts aren’t 1:1 either!) True… but, Alpha 2 ISO 3166 codes are also not 1:1 with layouts. Apple wasn’t just using flags, they were using icons with more or different details depending. I haven’t seen the two letter icons but I’m having a lot of trouble believing they can convey as much information as the old iconography. You can also have multiple layouts per proper locale (for example, en-US,) or multiple IME modes. Icons with more detail are strictly better. Flags are intuitive and recognizable. I feel as though people are being contrarian about this.
- mayoff 4y ago
  It doesn't just use two-letter codes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31521207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31521207
Arubis 4y ago
Whether politics are involved or not, this is a move from one insufficient solution (mapping keyboard layouts to expressed nationality) to another insufficient solution (mapping keyboard layouts to two-character language codes). You really need both; there are layout/locale variations within the same language across countries (e.g. en-*: en-US, en-UK, etc.) and within the same country across languages (e.g. *-CA: en-CA, fr-CA). A naïve solution would be superimposing a two-letter language code on a flag, but if avoiding flag-related politics is part of the calculus here, maybe there's a better approach.
- mayoff 4y ago
  It doesn't just use two-letter codes. The Arabic layouts show “ع”. The Hebrew layouts show “א‎”. The Greek layout shows “λ”. The Thai layouts show “ก”. The Canadian English layout shows “CA”, the French layout shows “FR”, the Canadian French layout shows “CA” above “CSA”, and the Swiss French layout shows “CH” above “FR”.
lr1970 4y ago
Why not having language icons. Sometimes they correspond to flags sometimes not. The point being that a colorful icon is a better GUI indicator than a two letter gray di-gramm. After all, we have emojis for pretty much everything under the Sun.
- jereees 4y ago
  Including the Sun itself.
fomine3 4y ago
Pro tip: Never use toggle button to switch input language, if you frequently switch between them. Just tap a specific key before you start input anything, so you no longer need to check/remember current state. Apple has been done the right thing on Mac Japanese keyboard. Tap 英数 to input Alphabet, tap かな to input Japanese kana. https://store.storeimages.cdn-apple.com/8567/as-images.apple.com/is/MK2A3J?wid=572&hei=572&fmt=jpeg&qlt=95&.v=1628010489000 https://store.storeimages.cdn-apple.com/8567/as-images.apple...
aristofun 4y ago
This is just plain terrible decision from UX perspective, which is why most people fell in love with mac in the first place. I would definitely fire all responsible people if i were Steve Jobs.

49 points by ericmay 4y ago

rcarmo 4y ago

Actually, as someone who switches between US and PT layouts several times a day, I find the little flag an annoying RGB eyesore on an otherwise pristine monochrome menu bar. GNOME also uses letters (and Windows), so I’m fine with that.

I_dev_outdoors 4y ago

Having a flag displayed isn't apparently worth dealing with the controversy. Decisions like this make me feel like software isn't really designed for people.

andybak 4y ago
Surely "avoiding controversy" or otherwise is exactly what's involved in designing for people? Controversy is intrinsically a human issue so I'm not sure I get your point.
praestigiare 4y ago
I'm not disagreeing with you, but it's funny because being designed for people is exactly why there is controversy.

bombcar 4y ago

I don't really see how having "EN" instead of a US or UK or whatever flag is really going to make people happier or sadder.

OJFord 4y ago
Tbh when I used a Mac I did think it looked oddly inconsistent that it was the only colour in the status bar. And as evidenced by OP some people obviously liked that, it's a change, of course some will like and some will not (and others will be indifferent).
- mantas 4y ago
  It makes it much easier to tell which layout is active.
  - OJFord 4y ago
    Specifically that it's in colour? Sure, if you have two layouts with very similar flags I suppose.
    - mantas 4y ago
      It's easier to find the icon because it stands out being colorful. And languages I use have very different flags. So it was super easy to tell which one is active. Now the keyboard icon is lost in menu bar and it's hard to tell languages apart.
akersten 4y ago
Out of the corner of my eye I can see if my keyboard is in US mode (red/white/blue) or Spanish (yellow/red). Can't do that now, need to actually move my eyes to the corner of the screen to read low contrast grayscale ES or EN. Horrible UI regression.
- kzrdude 4y ago
  Some kind of visual cue would be good - but what's the solution - another set of icons, color coding, or what? Maybe black for system default and other bright colors for the remaining choices.
- bombcar 4y ago

ceejayoz 4y ago

The Unicode Consortium has indicated they won't accept new flags as emoji. https://www.engadget.com/unicode-no-flag-emoji-please-131509128.html https://www.engadget.com/unicode-no-flag-emoji-please-131509... Given this, it's a sensible move; it won't be long before the available set no longer reflects the full set of countries.

OJFord 4y ago
Related issue I hadn't thought of before: what happens if the flag is changed? Suppose it partly depends if the unicode description is 'flag of the country blah' or blazon-style description of what it looks like.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  Font vendors update their fonts, I'd guess.
  - corrral 4y ago
    Not great that a historical usage of the older flag would start rendering as the new one. Maybe Unicode needs to incorporate a date into each glyph /s
- sharikous 4y ago
  The Afghan flag has this exact problem now. Plus the political issue of recognizing or not the Taliban government
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- cabirum 4y ago
  Unicode supports alternate character styles and combining characters, they can be used to refer to specific flag "versions"
matthewmacleod 4y ago

tyoma 4y ago

I am going to assume this has something to do with China/Taiwan/Hong Kong since that is the only market that is both big enough to force the change and where the political leadership is very sensitive about flag/name/border issues.

jfzoid 4y ago
doubt it -- see my comment about how Chinese inputs are not using flags in Big Sur

egorfine 4y ago

In Ukraine this matters for a lot of people. Half if not the majority of ukrainians are russian-speaking and confusing russian language with russia is not something we like.

akersten 4y ago
What I don't understand is why Apple cannot simply make this a toggle option in settings somewhere. No, it has to work one way and one way only...
- widowlark 4y ago
  Isn't that how Apple operates with everything in every instance?
  - kergonath 4y ago
    There are plenty of boxes to check or uncheck in the system preferences, so no, this is not how “Apple operates with everything in every instance”.
    - GekkePrutser 4y ago
      Compare it to other OSes and you will see that 'plenty' is not actually a lot in this case. I really was thrilled when I finally moved over to KDE from macOS. Over the years they had forced a number of changes I was really unhappy with. Like the inability to put virtual desktops in a grid, among others, that was pulled somewhere around 10.9 or so. It turned out that KDE just offers this and most of my other annoyances with options. You want them in a line, you want them in a grid? Whatever you please. Also, choose what kind of transition, how you'd like to identify which one is active, etc etc. Everything can be configured. You can even name them if you like. It's really amazing being able to set everything up the way I need it again. Apple had an OK baseline for me around the Tiger/Lion era, but after this they started going downhill. Launchpad, Mission Control etc were all regressions from the previous options like Expose. Also moving to ever lower-density UIs that mimic mobile devices (without actually offering touch support that necessitates bigger buttons) really annoyed me. Very happy with the choice and the Qt-based FOSS software is similarly better than Apple's for the same reasons. Many configuration options and choices.

vehemenz 4y ago

I 100% applaud this. I've always used ABC Extended because I thought a flag in the system menu was gaudy and weirdly nationalistic. I know I live in the US and use the American English keyboard layout. Similarly, I don't need a Chinese flag every time I switch to a Chinese keyboard.

alex_sf 4y ago
What's wrong with nationalism? Do you also think supporting your local community is weird?
- shuckles 4y ago
  The specific claim was weirdly nationalistic, which seems reasonable since lots of users outside America use the “American English” keyboard layout, to the point where it’s not clear why that’s the right signifier. Probably more Indian users use that layout than Americans.
- drcongo 4y ago
  - Veen 4y ago
    > You know countries are just made up right? So are flags, programming languages, natural languages, genders, political parties, ideologies, religions, racial categories, and about a million other things people care deeply about. Dismissing human constructs as "made up" and therefore irrelevant betrays a complete lack of understanding about how human beings operate.
    - drcongo 4y ago
      No it doesn't. Just because people do start wars over most of those things doesn't mean they should. It only takes a little shift to a less insular perspective to realise that the world doesn't have to be that way.

pengaru 4y ago

klodolph 4y ago
Was there ever a Taiwanese or Chinese flag there? I’m using an older version of the OS and I see tons of Chinese input methods, but none of them are associated with flags (which wouldn’t make sense to me anyway). Same as Japanese. Japanese is a near perfect correspondence between language and national identity, but none of the Japanese input methods use a flag. This doesn’t seem like it would be related to China or Taiwan in any way.
mschuster91 4y ago
The problem isn't Apple. The Taiwan question is not something that should (or can) be dealt with by corporations - it is something to be solved by politicians and governments. China demands suppressing everything that even hints of Taiwan not being an independent country, even outside of its borders? Fine, sanction them to hell and beyond.

jfzoid 4y ago

In Big Sur Apple was using a mix of flags and other icons. The flags seem to be for countries that use the Latin alphabet. Playing around with the Keyboard Preferences, I've found: Different Chinese inputs use different sinograms: the one for Pinyin uses the symbol for "Pin" all Hebrew inputs use the Hebrew letter aleph all Korean inputs use the same Korean symbol all Thai inputs use the same Thai symbol all Arabic inputs use the same Arabic symbol Greek uses a lambda for one input and an epsilon for the other Russian curiously uses a Russian flag and not a Cyrillic letter

samrolken 4y ago

This is ultimately a good move, and matches trends and emerging best practices on the web and elsewhere. Some countries have more than one language. Some languages have more than one country. And the political implications of all of this all mixed in.

kergonath 4y ago
> This is ultimately a good move, and matches trends and emerging best practices on the web and elsewhere. It solves some issues and creates others. Icons are more helpful than words in the menu bar, particularly as it gets more monochrome. And the complete confusion between buttons that look like text, links, actual buttons, and weird typography we find on the web is not exactly a good model to emulate. I really would not call that “best practices”, as they are responsible for a significant worsening of the UX on all mainstream platforms.
- samrolken 4y ago
  In general, the vast majority of UI elements are labeled with text instead of pictures, and have been for a long time. (Other issues with UI notwithstanding.)

richiebful1 4y ago

I have a feeling the Russian invasion of Ukraine has something to do with this. As a Russian speaker in the US, I've already had some weird conversations with coworkers because of the Russian flag as a keyboard indicator. Obviously this is a minor inconvenience for me, but it seems outmoded to attach a language/keyboard layout to a national flag

strict9 4y ago

Flags are not the way to define a language preference. This design decision assumes 1:1 parity with flag and language which is just not true. This move makes language preferences less ambiguous or potentially less offensive and I applaud Apple for doing it.

elldoubleyew 4y ago
Note that for many languages a flag is not displayed rather a symbol. Chinese languages in particular follow this (拼 for simplified pinyin, 注 for traditional zhuyin). Also Japanese never displayed a flag (あ for hiragana, ア for katakana). I think it's better to follow this convention.
- _moof 4y ago
  Arabic as well. Loads of examples of such languages, with huge numbers of speakers. I think this is a reasonable change (and always found the colored icon in the menu bar to be gaudy anyway).
SllX 4y ago
Counterpoint: these weren’t necessarily language-specific but country-specific or sometimes dialect-specific or writing system-specific (Hiragana, Katakana, Romaji) or just plain alternative (DVORAK) input methods. My main keyboard input method is not “English” but “U.S.”, and it is one of 15 English-language keyboard input methods available in the Keyboard Input Sources pane. Since I have it set to US most of the time, I kept it in my menubar for the the last 16 years specifically so I could have a nice American flag icon up top in addition to a way to switch between keyboard input sources using the mouse. This change was unnecessary and doesn’t do anything to make the input sources less offensive, but merely removes some of the cultural flavor available out of the box.
kergonath 4y ago
There’s an easy way out: just make it a choice, like for the user menu.
- 4y ago

matthewmacleod 4y ago

I mean this seems broadly more sensible as a default option – it's quite hard to create a clear mapping between "keyboard layout" and "national flag". If you would like to add a flag of some kind to the menu bar anyway, I'm sure it would be very straightforward to whip up a little application to add whatever icon you want up there!

leipert 4y ago

Flags are not languages: http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-represent-language/ http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-re... Arguably it makes a little more sense for keyboard layouts, but even then. Edit: also with alternative layouts. Is Dvorak English? If you want you can create your own keyboard layout with Ukulele https://software.sil.org/ukelele/ https://software.sil.org/ukelele/ (or edit an existing one) and change the icon to any image.

layer8 4y ago
Two-letter icons also don’t help with alternative layouts. Flags are useful for e.g. US English vs. UK English, but are bad when a country has more than one official/widely-used language (e.g. Canada) or when multiple countries share the same keyboard language and layout.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  I was curious how Apple handled this for Canada, IMO their (previous?) solution seems reasonable enough: https://i.postimg.cc/SsT0Tsgs/Screen-Shot-2022-05-26-at-11-40-52-AM.png https://i.postimg.cc/SsT0Tsgs/Screen-Shot-2022-05-26-at-11-4...
- mayoff 4y ago
  It doesn't just use two-letter icons. The Arabic layouts show “ع”. The Hebrew layouts show “א‎”. The Greek layout shows “λ”. The Thai layouts show “ก”. The Canadian English layout shows “CA”, the French layout shows “FR”, the Canadian French layout shows “CA” above “CSA”, and the Swiss French layout shows “CH” above “FR”.

klodolph 4y ago

To be honest flags should never have been used to indicate language / keyboard layout / input method. It may be “fun” but these things only loosely correspond. None of the input methods I use ever used flags anyway.

anentropic 4y ago

Surely a flag (country symbol) is the wrong identifier for a language though? There is a many-to-many relation between countries and languages, so flag for language is a bad UI choice.

GekkePrutser 4y ago
It is but it has become a standard over time. People know what it means. There are many cultural and language things that make zero sense but just became that way.
- fomine3 4y ago
  How is it standard?

devit 4y ago

What? Surely it's much easier to tell a language by specifying it's two-letter code rather than a "flag" that may identify a country if you remember it, and which has nothing to do with a language

Wowfunhappy 4y ago

Did Apple merely change the language selection UI, or did they also remove flags from their emoji font? OP only mentions the former, but many replies seem to be referencing the latter.

ericmay 4y ago
I've only noticed this in the language selection UI for keyboard input, but not for emoji.

Mizza 4y ago

This might be for political reasons. MS removed all flag emojis entirely in Windows 10, likely because of that island where all of our GPUs get manufactured, or the open air prison next to where our military surplus gets sent to.

r_hoods_ghost 4y ago

Except flags are a terrible way of identifying a language. Many (most?) countries have multiple official languages, and most languages are spoken in more than one country, so there is not a one to one mapping between flags and languages. And that's not even getting into the political side.

layer8 4y ago

Incidentally, that’s how Windows has been indicating keyboard input language in the taskbar all along.

peacefulhat 4y ago

It sucks for me because the flags were how I knew which language I’m in when I switch between English and Asian languages. Now they all look the same out of the corner of my eye and I reflexively toggle the language when I don’t need to.

_moof 4y ago

If you want a flag in your menubar that bad, take the long weekend to learn a little macOS programming. IIRC the API you'll want is NSStatusBar. (That might be outdated info, but hey, that's part of the fun.)

e38383 4y ago

I haven’t used a second layout in some time, but thanks for a clear indication and gering rid of these stupid icons which never made any sense to me. And they were way harder to decode.

malauxyeux 4y ago

The flags led to a tense discussion with my boss once. At my first office job in Canada, I was given a Mac. I activated US QWERTY for programming and CSA to be able to write messages with French accents. One day not long after, I'm programming with US QWERTY enabled – US flag in the menu bar – and my boss comes up behind me, points, and says, "What ... is ... that ... ?" It felt like it took forever to convince him that the flag just signified that I was using a particular keyboard layout and that it didn't mean anything else – to me, anyway. All completely avoidable. For better or worse, people assign a lot of meaning to flags. I can see why it's sensible to avoid using them for something benign like keyboard layout.

mcphage 4y ago
...what did he think it meant?
- malauxyeux 4y ago
  I didn't ask as I was pretty new at that point. I assume he thought I'd put it there to show political allegiance or something like that.

aeyes 4y ago

I would say that I am a true international user with 3 layouts. I just use the control-space keyboard shortcut, I get a big popup in the middle of the screen showing the currently selected keyboard map.

abdusco 4y ago
I'm not getting a large popup. How do you get it to show up? I've been using this shortcut[0] to switch between input layouts. Before realizing that I could set a shortcut for it, I used this utility[1] + Alfred for it. This is still quite useful if you want to switch to a specific keyboard layout. [0]: https://i.imgur.com/urcqU1i.png https://i.imgur.com/urcqU1i.png [1]: https://github.com/myshov/xkbswitch-macosx https://github.com/myshov/xkbswitch-macosx
- aeyes 4y ago
  I didn't change any setting related to this and it has always been there. Like I said, the default shortcut is Control-Space. Here is a thread with a screenshot and some users saying that the popup not working might be related to having the shortcut mapped to do something else: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3045492 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3045492
  - abdusco 4y ago
    Oh, I needed to enable the shortcut. It's working now. https://i.imgur.com/mkuqSlw.png https://i.imgur.com/mkuqSlw.png

kergonath 4y ago

> For true international users (not those of us just using it to display something pretty) it'll be harder to tell what language you are using because flags are easier to identify than gray text. Indeed. That is a pain in the backside…

qgin 4y ago

Latin American Spanish already has been living in the future with this one. There was no way to pick a flag for that.

dragonwriter 4y ago

It has been said that a language is a dialect with a flag and an army, but, really, the correspondence between flags and languages is not great, and the use of flags to represent language choices has always been placing pretty above useful in a way which is worse the more diverse your international market is.

jfengel 4y ago

ATMs in the EU have apparently started to use the Irish flag for English. Brexit removed the UK from the EU, and Ireland is the only EU country with English as its primary language. Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/ezsjhj/all_atms_in_brussels_been_updated_to_this_lads_ye/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/ezsjhj/all_atms_in... I suspect the Irish aren't much happy about being the symbol for "English", either. So... removing flags seems like a fine idea. They make so much sense in the common case, but there are enough corner cases to ditch the whole thing.

jchw 4y ago
OK… but this is keyboard layouts. There is in fact a United Kingdom keyboard layout, which has little to do with geopolitics. I will venture to guess it would turn into the letters “UK” in this case.
_abox 4y ago
> Ireland is the only EU country with English as its primary language. Speaking of politically correct, I can imagine some people from the gaeltacht would not approve of the description of English as the primary language in Ireland. The good thing about flags is that they are visual icons. Country codes are usually in English and our script. How would this work in countries that can't read that? Or people visiting an ATM in e.g. an Arab country and having to find which option is "English" in Arabic. This is where flags really shine.

jchw 4y ago

A lot of people are pointing out that flags are not 1:1 with layouts. (Not languages people; languages and layouts aren’t 1:1 either!) True… but, Alpha 2 ISO 3166 codes are also not 1:1 with layouts. Apple wasn’t just using flags, they were using icons with more or different details depending. I haven’t seen the two letter icons but I’m having a lot of trouble believing they can convey as much information as the old iconography. You can also have multiple layouts per proper locale (for example, en-US,) or multiple IME modes. Icons with more detail are strictly better. Flags are intuitive and recognizable. I feel as though people are being contrarian about this.

mayoff 4y ago
It doesn't just use two-letter codes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31521207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31521207

Arubis 4y ago

Whether politics are involved or not, this is a move from one insufficient solution (mapping keyboard layouts to expressed nationality) to another insufficient solution (mapping keyboard layouts to two-character language codes). You really need both; there are layout/locale variations within the same language across countries (e.g. en-*: en-US, en-UK, etc.) and within the same country across languages (e.g. *-CA: en-CA, fr-CA). A naïve solution would be superimposing a two-letter language code on a flag, but if avoiding flag-related politics is part of the calculus here, maybe there's a better approach.

mayoff 4y ago
It doesn't just use two-letter codes. The Arabic layouts show “ع”. The Hebrew layouts show “א‎”. The Greek layout shows “λ”. The Thai layouts show “ก”. The Canadian English layout shows “CA”, the French layout shows “FR”, the Canadian French layout shows “CA” above “CSA”, and the Swiss French layout shows “CH” above “FR”.

lr1970 4y ago

Why not having language icons. Sometimes they correspond to flags sometimes not. The point being that a colorful icon is a better GUI indicator than a two letter gray di-gramm. After all, we have emojis for pretty much everything under the Sun.

jereees 4y ago
Including the Sun itself.

fomine3 4y ago

Pro tip: Never use toggle button to switch input language, if you frequently switch between them. Just tap a specific key before you start input anything, so you no longer need to check/remember current state. Apple has been done the right thing on Mac Japanese keyboard. Tap 英数 to input Alphabet, tap かな to input Japanese kana. https://store.storeimages.cdn-apple.com/8567/as-images.apple.com/is/MK2A3J?wid=572&hei=572&fmt=jpeg&qlt=95&.v=1628010489000 https://store.storeimages.cdn-apple.com/8567/as-images.apple...

aristofun 4y ago

This is just plain terrible decision from UX perspective, which is why most people fell in love with mac in the first place. I would definitely fire all responsible people if i were Steve Jobs.