Somewhere in the neighborhood of 30% of blist users are outside the U.S. As such, one of the most frequent requests we’ve had since launching is to support many more character sets. We aren’t ready to declare it as a release yet, but we think we’ve completed the work to support all character sets throughout blist – from then back-end database through the front end user interface.

Now we’re asking for your help. If you’re one of our friends in Brazil, Italy, Japan or China can you try it out? Regardless of where you are, if you aren’t using a vanilla western character set, we’d like to know if you see any problems. We believe we now support storing and displaying user generated text in any character set – Kanji, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic and all others. If yours isn’t working, let us know.

Supporting international character sets is a step in the right direction, but we know it’s not the same as full international support. That would include having localized versions of our menus, icons, labels, messages and help files. We’re aways off from that still, but hopefully this first step towards supporting our international users will be a big help.

Ciao!