Many of our Windows Vista beta testers contact us excited to be test-driving the beta but wondering what to look for. I thought it might be nice to share here the test cases that we give interested beta testers. If you try these test cases and you have...

Someone asked me not too long ago for a list of Windows-supported languages that don't rely on white space for word breaking. I gave him a quick answer just because I happened to know, but then Yaniv Feinberg and I spent time trying to figure out a way...

A whole bunch of stuff comes together to make a user experience. This isn't just true in software, but rather in any industry that makes stuff. Most products that appeal to broad demographic groups have one of two qualities. One possibility is that the...

My last post produced a real onslaught of mail. It turns out that when it comes to community solutions in general and to wikipedia in paticular, people have no shortage of opinions. Curiously enough, it is the people who identified themselves as wikipedia...

I had an interesting conversation this morning with a colleague about community approaches to large-scale projects. We were mainly thinking about software, and in particular, the pieces of software that are most susceptible to a modular approach using...

A couple of days ago I posted about the Microsoft Locale Builder. But what about the locales that we're adding new for Vista? A few interesting facts: When Vista ships, it will include locale support for over 130 languages built in as part of Windows...

There are some linguistics jobs in software. There are many, many more applied linguistics jobs in software. They aren't the same thing. One of those things about formal or computational linguists is that they -- we -- identify ourselves and ourselves...

Michael Kaplan has blogged quite a bit about our release of the Microsoft Locale Builder Beta , the final version of which is planned for use on Vista when it ships. We're pretty excited about the Locale Builder here for a whole bunch of reasons. Like...

At long last, here it is! The blog I've been threatening for some time. I think I was inspired to finally get my butt in gear last night after having met up with Mark Liberman over at http://www.languagelog.com , which reminded me of when I used to have...