Ok, so I’m learning Greek right now. When venturing onto a colleagues PC, I noticed he was running Firefox in French. So I thought what a great opportunity to expose myself to the Greek language by running my apps in a foreign language also.
Although when we design apps, we generally include locale’s for different regions, switching an already installed app to a different language doesn’t seem to be as easy as changing a setting in Preferences.
For Firefox and the windows live apps, special language versions exist. I downloaded the Greek Firefox from here to get started. Interestingly, the installer looked all gyberish characters (yes more gyberish than greek!), but once installed all the menu’s, dialogs, status bars, etc came up in the Greek as expected. I decided to keep my installs separate as well rather than over the top of the existing one, but it does share the same profile folder without any strange issues so far.
Once your browser is in Greek, when you go to browse websites such as Windows Live, Google, etc, you’re results are all in Greek also (where applicable). Its one thing to read about (and even implement support for) internalisation and another to actually see it in practice. Nice touch.
The next thing you need to do is setup the Greek keyboard so you can type in Greek. There are a couple of keyboard layouts. Basically a modifier so you can type the accent characters. Greek Polytonic seems to be working for me. This Microsoft site has keymaps for each of the layouts showing you what key types what and how to get access to the modifiers.