Just out of curiosity, is there some major feature widely expected in the next update?
I’m still holding out for “Release with a panther,” because that would be badass.
Would they mail it to your house or would you just get to permission to visit it at zoo?
It would simply leap out of the upper optical-drive tray when the game begins (on most systems). There’d also be a USB option.
Sadly, it will be Glulx-only.
Far more powerful support for translations into other languages. That’s what I know of.
Oh this is interesting, thank you very much.
Should I dare expecting an easy way to translate it in japanese…?
Certainly not an easy one.
I’d say European languages are the primary target, and even for them translating Inform is unlikely to be actually easy.
On the other hand, I suppose it all depends on what the particular difficulties of a Japanese translation would consist in – and that, of course, I couldn’t tell.
Really, people, it’s well past time to let z-code go and switch your project to Glulx. I’ve tried to fit a panther in z-code’s limited memory space, and believe me, it’s not pretty.
But the panther portability, man! Panther portablity!
Wish I had a panther jump out of my mobile phone whenever I wanted to.
All I get is tiny little baby kittens.
Not that they aren’t cute, mind. But panthers, ah, panthers…
Maybe if you tried something with a bigger screen: a tablet, perhaps?
A panther is so last decade. Now it’s all about lions. Get with the times!
I’d like to think it’s a given that those who’d be interested in an I7 update are also the kind to avoid jumping on every little large-predatorial-cat fad that whizzes by on the whims of the media machine. Lions. Pff. Lions are fine for … Twitter, say. It’s fun to tweet a lion to someone. But I don’t think they have the gravitas for much more than that, and in six months they’ll be stale, anyway.
Any type of predatory feline, really – so passe. I’m hoping Apple will come up with something more imaginative for OSXI. Like, 11.1 Wildebeest. 11.2 Grizzly. 11.3 Warthog. 11.4 Skunk.
Well, maybe not skunk.
Warthog, hedgehog, badger, drake, eft, fawn, gibbon, heron, ibex, jackalope, koala, lynx, meerkat, narwhal, ocelot, pangolin – Ubuntu is way ahead of you. 
Steve Jobs greets us from the Outer Side. He insists that OS X be officially renamed “The Elder Thing” and wants Apple to launch Mac OS XI 11.1 Shoggoth 11.2 Mi-Go 11.3 Shub-Niggurath 11.4 Cthulhu 11.5 Yog-Sothoth 11.6 Nyarlathotep 11.7 Azathoth. (He also expresses a concern about the lack of what he calls “blasphemous angles” in the Apple Logo.)
All joking aside for a second…
Does this mean that I7 will natively allow for some niceties that’ll make translations easier, such as in-built object gender and the appropriate corresponding pronouns? Sort of what some extensions do already?
(I’m not saying “It’s not necessary because we have extensions for it”, mind. I’m just comparing)
Yes! I’m pretty sure it will do at least that.
Not to rain on anyone’s parade, I’ll confess to being bothered about the idea of a built-in object gender, mainly because gender isn’t properly a feature of the object but the word used to describe it. For instance, in Swedish, the same concept could be referred to as “en byggnad” (a building), “ett hus” (a house), “en bostad” (a dwelling), “ett hem” (a home), and none of these would be incorrect.
I’m sure if those issues are taken on-board - if the I7 crew is made aware of them, as it’s very possible they aren’t - they’ll think about it and about the best way to implement it. Or they’ll just ignore it, but only after having come to the conclusion that there is no way to simply and universally achieve it, leaving it for extension writers.
But the crew has to know about it. I hadn’t thought of it at all myself.
A workaround would be for an object to have several printed names, and the printed name include the article (previously defined by the user), such as “o edifício/a casa/o lar” (to use your examples), and then adjust the pronoun according to the word the player used, based on the information in the printed name.
I think it’s nightmarish to implement, but it’s a possible solution. I’m sure others exist.