Jay: >>Please correct me where I'm wrong in my assessment. > >But tedd, you get so snippy when I do that.... :-) But, I try so hard not to. >Okay. When you set up your computer, did you not go to System >Preferences and click on International, then Numbers, to confirm >that you wanted a period to indicate a decimal and a comma for a >divider? And on Time to indicate whether you wanted a 12-hr or 24-hr >clock? And on Date to.... You get the picture. Yes, that's correct -- but my military friend still had to change things to suit his purpose. Oh, and incidentally, I still don't like my date being shown in the menu bar as "Sun 9:22 AM" instead of the way I want it. So, in my view, they [Apple] still haven't got it right, even with their "let's automatically determine what the user should want" thing. >The "end user" has already specified all these things, or can. >That's why we need to use the appropriate toolbox calls (what you >refer to as an "International preference tool") to retrieve those >preferences. I think you'll find that most professional software >does so. I know my Palm Desktop speaks a different language from my >wife's, for instance. Sure, professional software has all the answers, so let's just give up and use c++. No need to think different. Ooops, there I go being snippy again. Oh, and the term "International preference tool" was used buy Alain, you called it the "localized format" -- I was just repeating what was said. As for me, I'm clueless as to what to call it. >My point (and Alain's, I believe) is that the software we write >should conform to the users' choices. To my surprise, FB apparently >does not. Nor does it make it easy for the code we write to do so. >So what was your recommendation? My recommendation was to write a piece of code to solve these problems. You did such a good job of creating the FB preference setting thing, with the help of the list, then why not try to tackle this problem in similar vein? My approach, to these type of problems, is to give the end-user the tools to do things they way they want (a TWM approach). Another approach could be to provide the user with an assortment of different formats and customs for him/her to choose. Remember, we are only doing this for FB applications and not for the entire system. Now one might say, this is redundant -- why not just you the system in place? To which I say, my good friend Jay said "FB apparently does not. Nor does it make it easy for the code we write to do so." so I'm offering a suggestion that we write our own. In that direction, Apple does have a nice interface for setting-up dates and times -- we may want to copy that. Your mileage may vary. It's just an idea to kick around on this list. tedd -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://sperling.com/