Emirates Mac had the pleasure of trying out a development beta version of a version of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger localized in Arabic. This means it's not just the Arabic support that has been present in Mac OS X since 10.2 Jaguar, but a complete Mac OS X in Arabic. The localization process is still under way and there is no known release date.
A first glimpse clearly shows that this is unfinished project, so many commands, applications, menus are in a mix of English and Arabic. That said, we obviously expect a fully Arabized Mac OS X when this project is completed. For example, the System Preferences window title is named in Arabic, while its relevant command in the Apple menu is still in English. The Arabic font is overall smooth and readable, but wordings are not accurate in some areas. The often rumored
resolution-independent interface that may be a part of Leopard would probably help make the Arabic font more readable since the user then can adjust the font size to suit the screen they use.
Reflecting back to the last Arabic Mac OS, 7.5.3, there were some phrases that people became used to see at that time. A suggestion for the people working on this add-on is to take a look at this earlier Arabic Mac OS version while working on this project.
Check out the Text Edit application, for example. While trying to Save As "Word Document", the translation doesn't give this meaning. A technically experienced person should check the translation afterwards. Not all warnings and alerts are translated, users with no or little English required to read, understand and decide which button to press.
While there are translated warning and information dialogs, the Help application doesn't support Arabic. This is an important feature for new Mac users in the Arab World who are concerned about learning new skills. The Help application must get Arabized. For example, while trying to search for how to burn CD, no results were shown.
Spotlight can find any Arabic named document and Arabic contents in specific documents such as Word, PDF. However this feature is available in the International system that supports Arabic language as well. Viewing folders and documents in the favorite columns style doesn't support preview, which is an important feature and doesn't show detailed information. While in the icon and list view some of this informations is visible. In the File Info. all information is scrambled and just partly visible.
All in all and keeping in mind this is a developer version, there is a long way to go before this is ready to be released to the general public. It seems the developers have put in place much of the underlying mechanisms for Mac OS X to be displayed in full Arabic, but there's much of the translations left to do as you can tell from the screen shots. Some key applications, like Safari and Mail, don't seem to have been touched at all so far, and we would expect the entire standard installation of Tiger to be Arabized if this is ever going to become something really useful. Whenever this is finished and released, there will also be issues of updated and new versions of Mac OS X. Apple has said that Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard will be released "spring 2007" and what we've looked at is an Arabic version of 10.4 Tiger which is not finished yet. So for users there are many questions still to be answered. We applaud the effort and look forward to seeing further developments.
Zaid and MacUAE were the ones taking the time to install and look at this preview so a big thank you to them.

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