Correct the German time format in Mail.app

Sep 03, '02 09:21:57AM

Contributed by: seb2

One of the worst German localization mistakes in Jaguar probably is Mail.app's display of times: it displays times in 12 hour format without appending any sort of "AM" or "PM" -- which is not used in Germany, anyway. There is no way to tell if a message arrived at 5 AM or at 5 PM (which should be displayed as 17:00, anyway).

To get Mail.app to correctly show the 24 hour time format, do this:

  1. Quit Mail.app if running
  2. Navigate to Applications in the Finder
  3. Right-click or control-click onto Mail.app and choose "Show package contents"
  4. Open Contents -> Resources -> German.lproj
  5. Find the file named "Localizable.strings" and make a backup copy in case anything goes wrong.
  6. Open the file in a text editor and find the line that reads "12HOUR_TIME_FORMAT" = "%1I:%M"; and replace it with "12HOUR_TIME_FORMAT" = "%H:%M";
  7. Save the file.
Mail.app should now correctly display 24 hour time format.

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