A group of Russian Mac users are petitioning Apple to add Russian localization to Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger). The petition notes that Mac OS X 10.3 is localized in English, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Finnish and Danish. Which begs the question, why no Russian localization for such a large country? “Apple traditionally didn’t pay much attention to the Russian market — even iPods don’t display cyrillic letters properly — and we don’t get Russian localization for Mac OS X as a part of the install, which turns away many potential new Mac users,” Slava Karpenko, a Mac programmer in Russia, told MacMinute.
