I’ve been looking for a Mac OS X equivalent of KDE’s kcharselect tonight and before I noticed that there is something similar already built in (the character map which is available from the internationalization menu), I stumbled upon UnicodeChecker:
And wow, this is a very fine application which goes even beyond the options the built-in solution provides. For me the following things were particularily useful:
- Browse the whole Unicode range by character blocks, either sorted by codepoints or by definition
- Built-in search for character names (Spotlight indexing possible) – say, you need a character / glyph to display a triangle, just search for “triangle” in Spotlight and it opens up in UnicodeChecker!
- Bookmarks and History of recently shown characters / codepoints
- Conversion from/to HTML / IDNA / Javascript / CSS UTF-8/16/32 encodings – very useful if you ever stumbled across problems like how to encode a unicode string for a javascript alert() box properly
- Splitting up unicode sequences – “Why are my textbreaks broken? Oh – must have been this non-breaking unicode space…”
- And last but not least: a very clean interface.
So while dealing with encodings is probably not the most sexiest thing on the planet, this application surely makes it fun to browse the Unicode range.
And if you still think you don’t need this application, just check out one of the other applications the authors, Steffen Kamp and Sven-S. Porst, have created – controlling iTunes by giving your Mac notebook a slap sounds interesting as well, doesn’t it?