A while back I was complaining about the lack of Arabic support on Apple iPods. The system obviously supported Unicode but lacked any fonts with the necessary glyphs.

To my knowledge this is still the case, but I care a lot less since I just picked up an iPod Touch the other day. I’m currently typing this on it, one uncoordinated poke after another.

The iPod touch supports a wide range of the Unicode tables, but still less than the desktop os. العربية and 中文 both have as much support as most people would need, though you’ll have to jump into Persian to type most extra Uyghur letters. The biggest shortcoming in my opinion is the lack of keyboard layouts or the ability to easily create your own. It looks like for now the best bet is to write a cocoa application that supports your keys. Of course since you can only run one program at a time, it means you’d have to copy everything in to your target app at once.

Would it be so hard to give us access to the Unicode palette, system wide?

It’s worth mentioning that you can actually do custom layouts, but it requires jailbreaking your iPhone or iPod touch. As I have a touch and don’t need to get on Chinese mobile networks, it’s not worth losing the ability to update my system or worse, getting it bricked.

update: So far this is one of the better options. It’s wikipedia’s page on IPA. This week or next I’m going to see if I can teach myself enough cocoa programming to come up with something better. I’d love to implement this as a webkit app and leave it all to javascript but unfortunately I don’t think Safari handles pasteboard functions.