The success of these developers inspired another, lukhnos, to create VanillaInput, a phonetic input method that supports the Eten Layout, in July 2004.

clkao's port is called ChewingOSX and was transferred to gugod (Kang-ming Liu) and zonble (Weizhong Yang) in 2004 for further maintenance. Using Xcode, a development tool included with OS X, it became possible to build customized input methods on OS X. In 2003, developer clkao (Chia-liang Kao) ported Chewing, a popular Chinese input method in Linux/FreeBSD world, to OS X. Without support for the Eten Layout on the Apple OS, Microsoft maintained a substantial customer base, especially in Taiwan, because the phonetic method in Windows included the Eten Layout as an optional configuration.Īpple's Mac OS X, launched in 2002, received negative feedback after another popular input method, Cangjie, was substantially modified, prompting complaints that the method in OS X was too unfamiliar, compared to that of OS 9. In the mid-1980s, prior to the globalization of computing and software distribution, new computer users learned the Eten Layout as their first (and often only) way of transcribing Chinese characters. However, Apple's Chinese Talk and later its Chinese version of Mac OS had a serious shortcoming: although several Chinese input methods were offered, one of them - the Phonetic ' Zhuyin' method - lacked the Eten Layout, which more closely emulates Chinese phonetics. There were several competing alternatives, but these never gained traction. In 1987, three years after launching Macintosh, Apple produced a Chinese version of its Finder (then the improper name of its later renamed 'Mac OS'), Chinese Talk. The motivation for OpenVanilla was for to fill an oversight in commercially available software.Īpple was slow to localize its operating system for the Chinese market.

Vanilla for mac