Until a few years ago, if you wanted to send a message in an East Asian language on your mobile phone, you usually had no choice but to buy a mobile phone from the country you're communicating with. At that time, only a limited number of phones were capable of handling Unicode and displaying East Asian character sets. Thankfully, with the advent of smart phones, and especially Google's open source Android operating system, this has changed, and mobile phones have become much more international. Today it is possible to have one mobile phone and install support for a whole set of different languages.
If you are as excited about the upcoming release of GIMP 2.8 as me, then it's probably for the new single-window mode that will debut with GIMP's next release. GIMP, the “GNU Image Manipulation Program”, has traditionally used a very unique interface consisting of a workspace and two floating toolbars. By far one of the most controversial design decisions in the open source world, this has lead to the creation of a number of forks which tried to combine all of GIMP's windows into one. Finally, though, starting with version 2.8, a single window mode will find its way into the official GIMP version.
Pidgin is an open source cross-platform instant messaging client that offers a straightforward way to access most popular chat networks from within one programme. Unfortunately, getting non-Latin language to display correctly on Pidgin can be a challenge.
