[dreamweaver]

Hi,

Listen I hope somebody out there understands the operating system of the MAC OS10 and can help me.

Here's the thing. I've been living in the states and recently moved to France. Which meanst that I know how to use....the "other" computer.

Now, before you "boo" me off the forum, we've got a MAC, and just recently put a new hard drive in it, so the kids can use it for schoolwork and stuff. And, IF I can ever figure out how to do more than play games on it, I think we're actually going to like it.

Well, my husband (who is French) decided to use French as the main language when he installed the operating system. (I know he did it because he hoped it would motivate us to learn French faster.) The problem is, we don't know how to use a MAC, we don't know how to get it to open and close documents or cut and paste or do any of 100 things that we need it to do...so this is causing some major problems for me...

Right now I'm ready to throw it off the balcony, get out my credit card and order...well, you know!

So, if you can save my sanity (and possibly my marriage), if you know of simple step-by-step directions for how I change the language into English, I'd really appreciate it. By the way, I'm technologically challenged in English, so I'm probably really hopeless in French. If you could just give me click this, do this, go here, it would really help!

My husband gets email from a MAC forum and he always gets the answers he needs for questions, so I'm hoping somebody will be able to help me too!

Thanks very much in advance!

[Love Calm Quiet]

Yours is a pretty unlikely sounding scenario (e.g., you're techno challenged but you put in a new hard disk?), but in case the question is real...

I wouldn't know how to tell you to navigate around in French to go back to English, but...

It would be easy to take the Restore CDs that came with your Mac and reinstall from scratch. That should keep any data intact.

[TETENAL]

I'm not sure whether you are trying to pull anyone's leg here, but anyway:

1) Click the blue Apple in the menu bar
2) Select the menu "Pr�f�rences Syst�me" (System Preferences)
3) Click the "International" preferences (blue UNO flag)
4) In the list of "Langues" (Languages) click on English but don't release the mouse button. Drag English to the top of the list.
5) Log out, then log in again and everything is in English

[JKT]

1. Open System Preferences:



2. Click the International icon:



3. Select the Language tab and drag and drop the languages in the list to put them in the order you would prefer to use them (e.g, English at the top):



4. You may need to logout/back in or restart, I'm unsure. I believe this will set the menus etc to the language you want to use.

P.S. I suspect all the menu and app names will be in French for you, so just click the same icons as indicated in the images.

[ManOfSteal]

1.) Choose Apple menu > System Preferences and click "International."

2.) Click "Language", then drag the language you most want to see in menus and dialogs to the top of the list. (If you don't see the language, click Edit.)

[Randman]

MoS, if it's French, the words would be different.

[OptimusG4]

I didnt think it was possible to throw a MAC address out the window.

[Randman]

What G4 is talking about, is it's Mac, not MAC. MAC means something totally different.

In the future, you can create different users. Your hubby can have his in French while leaving yours in English. best of both worlds and you can use an icon in the menu bar *with Fast User Switching* to make things even easier.

[ManOfSteal]

Originally Posted by Randman

MoS, if it's French, the words would be different.

1.) choisissent des pr�f�rences de menu > de syst�me de Apple et cliquent "international."

2.) Cliquent le "langage", tra�nent alors le langage que vous voulez plus voir dans les menus et les dialogues jusqu au dessus de la liste. (si vous ne voyez pas le langage, le clic �ditent.)



Nouveau Hotness !

[Randman]

Non mauvais, l'homme de volent. Non mauvais du tout.

[jamil5454]

And here's where my 3 years of french classes become useful.



Not.

[mdc]

or sherlock's french to english

[Hi I'm Ben]

Don't bother throwing it off the balcony. Send it to me I'll pay the shipping.

[dreamweaver]

Hi,
First of all, I just want to say "THANKS!" You guys are great! I checked back, not really expecting to get an answer, and found all of this help!

I'm not sure why some of you thought I was pulling your leg, but I'm going to take my laptop and go and try changing the language now, using your suggestions! (So that I can follow the directions so I don't mess it up!) And when I used the "we" changed the harddrive, I meant that as a general "we" not as in me! I might be able to pull it off with...you know, the "other" computer, but after downloading the instructions for doing it from the Internet, we hired someone to come in and change it! But, if it counts, I was there in the room. Most of the time.

Again, thank you very much! And to the person who wanted me to send them the computer, sorry...if I can get the language changed, knowing that there's this kind of help to be found, I think we'll keep it!

Anyway, seriously, thank you all very much for the help, suggestions and ideas!

Have a great night!

[dreamweaver]

Ha! It worked! It's actually in English, we can read it, the boys can use it!!! It's wonderful! My son said, "Gosh! This is exciting! I can read it and use it now!"

Thanks again, you guys were great!

Dreamweaver!

[PMDaly]

It might be better to have two user accounts. One with french and one with english. This way, as soon as you feel comfortable with the computer, you can try out your french with the other user account.
-P

[ghporter]

There's nothing "odd" or even incredibly "different" between a Mac and a PC. It's all in the idiom-much like how you go about various activities of daily living in France in a slightly different way than you do in the States. Once you and your kids get the hang of using the Mac's significantly simpler user interface, changing to French will not be any big deal (providing you've mastered the language, of course!). Welcome to Macdom from one switcher to another.

As for changing out a drive in a Mac, it's no different than doing the same thing in a PC, except that the Mac's case is better designed-not to mention cooler looking.

[analogika]

Point 1:
Get used to stuff being a lot easier than you'd expect it to be, coming from Windows. If you want to put something somewhere - be it text, pictures, a mail attachment, whatever - try just dragging it there with the mouse.

Point 2 (follows from Point 1):
Say good-bye to using full-screen mode. Make Windows no larger than they *need* to be to display the content. (The green "+" gumdrop in the window's title bar will generally do this for you.) The reasoning is that, since *everything* is drag-and-drop, across applications, across everything, you will be dragging stuff between windows a lot, so you want to obstruct background windows as little as possible. (The main reason full-screen is the default on Windows is because of the totally brain-dead idea of sticking the menu bar INSIDE the window, so making windows smaller than full-screen will make your menubar wrap into two or three lines. )

Point 3:
Almost all the keyboard shortcuts you knew in Windows are there, except they use the cloverleaf (a.k.a. Apple a.k.a. Command) key, instead: Cmd-X, Cmd-C, Cmd-V for cut, copy, and paste, Cmd-Q for quit, Cmd-Z for undo, and Cmd-TAB for switching applications (the latter even works WHILE you are dragging an object/text/image/etc., so you can drag from one application into another even more easily).

Don't blame Apple for not using Ctrl for these keys; we were there a long time before Windows.

Oh, and it's "Mac", not "MAC". "MAC" is an acronym to do with network addresses. "Mac" is shorthand for Apple's Macintosh line of computers.

[midwinter]

Originally Posted by analogika

Point 3:
Almost all the keyboard shortcuts you knew in Windows are there, except they use the cloverleaf (a.k.a. Apple a.k.a. Command) key....

Ahem. The accepted term for that key is either the "pretzel key" or "deedlie thingy key."

[real]

Originally Posted by JKT

1. Open System Preferences:



2. Click the International icon:



3. Select the Language tab and drag and drop the languages in the list to put them in the order you would prefer to use them (e.g, English at the top):



4. You may need to logout/back in or restart, I'm unsure. I believe this will set the menus etc to the language you want to use.

P.S. I suspect all the menu and app names will be in French for you, so just click the same icons as indicated in the images.

Nice work with the manual,


REAL

[Person Man]

Originally Posted by midwinter

Ahem. The accepted term for that key is either the "pretzel key" or "deedlie thingy key."

Deedlie thingy??

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

How do you trash the language files you don't need? Where are they located?

[MartiNZ]

They're the ones inside most of the .app packages aren't they. Da.lproj and all that.

[Brass]

Originally Posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker

How do you trash the language files you don't need? Where are they located?

There's a utility that does this for you... can't remember its name though. Check version tracker. Can't comment on its reliability.

Not much point though, they don't cause any problems other than taking up a bit of disk space.

[desertmac]

Originally Posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker

How do you trash the language files you don't need? Where are they located?

Macaroni will do it for you automatically on a regular schedule.

[PMDaly]

Is trashing language files necesarily smart?
-P

[workerbee]

Originally Posted by ghporter

There's nothing "odd" or even incredibly "different" between a Mac and a PC. It's all in the idiom-much like how you go about various activities of daily living in France in a slightly different way than you do in the States.

"Royale with cheese" anyone? Or rather "Le Big Mac" (or should that be "Le Big MAC")?

Edit: one thing that dreamweaver will find difficult, I can imagine, are the french Umlauts. Using or even finding them on an american keyboard could possibly be quite involved. Using a french keyboard is even worse: it's hard to find any characters at all on the thing.

[Preciousss]

The two that I'm familiar with are DeLocalizer and Monolingual. I use the former, though I don't recall why I chose it over the other.

AFAIK, DeLocalizer is not officially supported in Panther, but it works fine for me.

Originally Posted by Brass

There's a utility that does this for you... can't remember its name though. Check version tracker. Can't comment on its reliability.

Not much point though, they don't cause any problems other than taking up a bit of disk space.

[alphasubzero949]

DeLocalizer does work in Panther. It saves roughly 1 GB (give or take 100 MB) of space when run for the first time. Bear in mind that you'll have to run it again after installing other apps (but the savings aren't very significant unless you decide to install several hundred apps).

[Randman]

If you do a custom install, you can opt to leave most of the language packs out to begin with. Then you just need to run Delocalizer after big installs such as Office which reloads certain language packs.

[sworthy]

how did you make the red circles on the graphics?

[TETENAL]

Originally Posted by workerbee

Edit: one thing that dreamweaver will find difficult, I can imagine, are the french Umlauts.

French doesn't have umlauts. It has diacritic marks including diaeresis that look like the umlaut dots, but they serve a different purpose.

[Oisín]

Originally Posted by TETENAL

French doesn't have umlauts. It has diacritic marks including diaeresis that look like the umlaut dots, but they serve a different purpose.

Damn you, I was about to say that!

However, Workerbee's second point is quite true: Finding anything on a French keyboard is like your own little treasure hunt, and trying to find letters with diatric marks on an American keyboard layout isn't much easier. Try with Portuguese instead. It has most of the letters in the same place as an American keyboard, but has extra keys for �, and �`^�� are all easily accesible.

[Appleman]

Originally Posted by sworthy

how did you make the red circles on the graphics?

He probably did it with a very unknown program named Photoshop

[d.fine]

You can also use Scriboard, handy little thing for things like these...

[JKT]

Originally Posted by Appleman

He probably did it with a very unknown program named Photoshop

Actually, I did it with the indispensable and brilliant little piece of freeware known as ImageWell which makes posting images to my iDisk a breeze (it'll also work with any other WebDAV or ftp server). It even automatically adds the necessary [img ] [/img ] tags around the URL for you for easy pasting in the message text:

[Appleman]

Indeed a great app! Thanks!

[workerbee]

Originally Posted by TETENAL

French doesn't have umlauts. It has diacritic marks

Thanks. I realized they were probably not called umlauts, but i had no idea what they were called in english.

BTW: the Swiss keyboards also have all the more important diacritic marks (ha!) like � � � � and �, while still being a lot closer in design to the US layout than the French.

[Appleman]

Don't you all love it that it started with a French balcony...and now we are talking about unlauts in French and handy little apps in OS X

[Oisín]

Zeah, the Swiss kezboard is a little closer to the American lazout, but I still it�s quite odd the waz the different extra kezs (like ���$� etc.) are spread out...

I of course still prefer using the Danish layout - the only thing it lacks is an easy way to type �...

[romeosc]

Ahem. The accepted term for that key is either the "pretzel key" or "deedlie thingy key."
__________________


I still call it "OPEN APPLE KEY" ....I guess my old APPLE][ days are showing!

[analogika]

Originally Posted by romeosc

"deedlie thingy key."

I have never - not in sixteen years of Mac use - heard that term.

"Open Apple Key" I remember well, though.

[Appleman]

Originally Posted by analogika

I have never - not in sixteen years of Mac use - heard that term.

"Open Apple Key" I remember well, though.

Way way back in the early years we use to say "Appeltje O", "Appeltje P", "Appeltje S", etc, where "Appeltje" stands for the Dutch / Flamish expression for the key on your keyboard which represents the Swedish icon which came from a traffic sign.
See: http://www.lowendmac.com/lab/02/0718.html and http://www.answers.com/topic/command-key
There seem to be several names for it:

the splat
the cloverleaf
the butterfly
the beanie
the flower

[Randman]

I've used Macs since 1984 and I've never heard any of those terms.

[Appleman]

Originally Posted by Randman

I've used Macs since 1984 and I've never heard any of those terms.

Well, some people are deaf

[Randman]

Originally Posted by Appleman

Well, some people are deaf

or dumb?

[Appleman]

Originally Posted by Randman

or dumb?

Never mind, I just wanted to point to some websites where one can read about the origin of the command icon.

[Watson]

Originally Posted by Appleman

the splat
the cloverleaf
the butterfly
the beanie
the flower

the propeller

[Brass]

Looks like the result of a Celt who failed knot school, to me.

EG, here's one that didn't fail:

[Mithras]

I just want to say that this thread is classic MacNN. One clueless newbie saying "MAC", a few enraged zealots, a bunch of terrific technical advice, some feel-good Mac advocacy, and finally a sprinkling of old-timey Apple humor and lore. Really great, thanks all.