An excellent first step is to study the Guide To Macintosh Software Localization, available from APDA or your local bookseller. By following Apple's guidelines for localization, you can avoid time and resource consuming changes to source code. Putting text strings in resources, allowing room for double-byte characters in menus and dialog boxes, and using international resources for date, time, and currency are basics that you should follow, even in the prototype stage.

Localization can be expensive, especially when the costs are multiplied by the number of markets you enter. Every hard-coded text string can either cause an error or require recoding for each market. It's better to do it right the first time, then you don't have to worry about the multiplication factor.

Caere's Distribution Manager Matt Miller suggests, 'Make sure that your product can be easily translated. That will affect how you develop source code, and also how you write your product manual. The manual must be well written and concise, because translation is not inexpensive.'

Also, when launching a product your attention is focused on getting the product out the door. But the little time and effort it takes to follow the Apple coding guidelines can yield marketing benefits that you may not foresee. For example, while doing a QuickMail demo in Europe, CE Software learned exactly what its programmers had done right. CE Software's International Product Manager Paul Miller explains, 'At a trade show in The Netherlands, a gentleman asked, "Will QuickMail run in Arabic?" We had no idea. He told us he had the Arabic Macintosh system software with him, and asked us to try it. Our president, Richard Skeie, and I went into the exhibit hall after hours, loaded the Arabic system, and our product worked! We were using part of the Script Manager support, but basically, we used TextEdit.'

Even if you plan to market only the English language version of your software in other countries, avoid the temptation during early design to neglect features that will let your product accommodate multiple languages. If you do so, you may have to pass up a promising market opportunity later on—or spend a lot of money revamping your product.