Apple’s Macintosh operating system and the Chinese language have a long history. Many years ago, when I was an undergraduate college student, well before the advent of Mac OS X and the rise of Unicode, I was already happily inputing Chinese on my Mac and delighted in amazing my friends with the Apple Chinese voice recognition software I had gotten soon after its release in 1996. Meanwhile, PC users I knew across campus and the world were drowning in the technical challenges of mysterious programs such as Twinbridge and its earlier and more obscure competitors. I know from my own experience as a former tech support geek at Columbia University that the legacies of these issues continue to haunt Chinese language departments around the US.
With Windows XP, however, Microsoft finally started getting their act together and created a typically clunky but still relatively easy method (with about a dozen clicks + the use of your OS cd) for adding Chinese input to a non-Chinese OS. Since then I have felt that the Mac Chinese input options lagged behind, especially in the convenience of inputting traditional characters (繁體/繁体). The “Hanin” input method was something of an improvement, but with tens of millions of customers in China using pirated copies of Windows XP and only a handful using the more expensive Macintosh solutions for their computing, it is not surprising that Apple has lost its innovation edge in the area of Chinese input.
Well, I have apparently been somewhat out of the loop since mid-2006. Today I took a few minutes to skim through a year or two of the postings on the Google Group “Chinese Mac.” Thanks to this I was able to learn about a fantastic new piece of software for the Mac:
QIM Input Method ($20)
You can read a bit more about the software on the internet’s premier resource for (English language) information about inputting Chinese on the Mac.
I would recommend anyone who inputs Chinese frequently on the Mac to try out QIM, which is fantastic. I dished out the $20 within 10 minutes of confirming that the software works in all the basic work applications I frequently use Chinese in (Omnioutliner, Microsoft Word, Wenlin, Apple Mail, iFlash). QIM produces characters in real time as you type, has amazing shortcut options, and optionally defaults all output to traditional characters.