Apple doesn’t understand Armenia 🇦🇲

TidBITS Talk
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I just got back from a trip to my homeland and I was disappointed to find that Apple Maps is incapable of providing any navigation in Armenia. Even in the bustling world class capital city of Yerevan, it can’t get you directions between two popular spots.

We were forced to use Google Maps which handled things fairly well, aside from its rather sluggish (and I think sometimes inaccurate) compass (“which way am I facing??”). The walking directions even found some rather obscure shortcuts through parking lots.

Separately, Apple has almost no idea about weather in Armenia. It appeared to give a single forecast for “Armenia” no matter where we went.

Now (that I left Armenia) I see that searching for some specific Armenian cities is giving more specific weather. (I thought I tried this when I was there, though, and didn’t get any hits on specific cities). So I’m wondering if the problem was with the GPS satellite support, or lack thereof. And maybe this was also what plagued Apple Maps. Maybe Apple apps couldn’t tell where I was and that crippled both navigation and at least “current location” weather.

The part that doesn’t make sense is that Google Maps worked fine. Likewise, weather.com worked fine:

I confess I didn’t do more controlled experiments. Internet was intermittent and I was busy trying to see sights and keep track of my family. But the fact that non-Apple apps worked better than native ones on the same iPhone tells me Apple has something to fix here.

Steve Jobs’ adoptive mother was Armenian, and I remember appreciating in early days of OS X that Apple had a Unicode True Type font (I think Sylfaen?) that supported the Armenian character set. I recall decades back, exchanging a few emails with Jobs’ right hand man, Avie Tevanian, also Armenian, about my appreciation for this support. Combined with support from the Input Source menu and keyboard viewer, the Mac was a world class publishing platform for Armenian, and my aging Dad was able to learn how to use it to compose bilingual articles suitable for publication.

Meanwhile, Armenia has come a long way in the past generation since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and is now an emerging country swarming with iPhone-carrying natives and tourists. I’d love to see Apple look into these issues and “put Armenia back on the map”!

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I think the name of that font was Mshtakan

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Yes, that was another one! I forget how to the two differed!

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I searched my mailbox and found an email with some history. Back in 2004, I wrote to the editors at O’Reilly Media, for whom I’ve done some Technical Editing over the years. I think we were going back and forth about a possible UNICODE book idea. Below is a snippet of that email:

Interestingly, I wrote a brief Armenian-English bilingual document using
Mac OS X’s TextEdit tool this weekend. When you switch to the Armenian
“Keyboard Layout”, I think that maps keyboard keys to the Unicode
characters for the Armenian letters. Then, when I begin typing, TextEdit
is smart enough to change my font to something called Mshtakan because
Arial is probably not capable of displaying those Armenian Unicodes.

Then, I sent the document to my PC (running Windows), along with the
Mshtakan font, since I didn’t know if Windows would need that font (but
I didn’t install the font). I then opened the document in Word and it
displayed just fine in both languages. It didn’t need Mshtakan. It was
smart enough to find its own font, Sylfaen, which is designed to handle
Armenian and Georgian character sets. (They also have a “Arial Unicode”
which supposedly has support for Armenian and presumably every other
character under the sun).

As another interesting (if unfortunate) note, MS Word for the Mac does
NOT have support for Armenian (yet). When I typed in Armenian (by
switching keyboards) in Word for the Mac, I just got those “boxes” that
fonts display when they don’t know what to display. The Help file
confirms that Armenian is not one of the supported languages in W4Mac.
So there is an issue of application-dependence, too. However, I’m not
entirely sure I understand why an application, if it supports Unicode in
general, would not support every language for which the OS has fonts:
why does the application care? Also, I tried to “coerce” W4Mac by
switching to the Mshtakan font manually. Interestingly, however, W4Mac
did not show this font in its list of fonts, presumably b/c it doesn’t
know how to deal with it.

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You might find this page interesting. It lists supported countries by feature.

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Is this still the case?

Looking at my current installation of Word, I see that Armenian is still not on the list of languages, but that should only affect proofing tools (spelling and grammar).

I was able to type Armenian characters via the Character Viewer app using the Arial Unicode MS font, but I did not try setting up an Armenian keyboard in macOS.

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No. I forget when it changed. But Word on the Mac is what my dad used to do all his bilingual writing. It works great.

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Very cool!

Odd that Weather is not mentioned! Perhaps because a third party handles it?

Maps Directions are available for surprisingly few countries!

I’m also curious how Directions differs from turn by turn navigation…