This is how the Hawaiian language support works in Mac OS X:

If you go to the "International" System Preference and click on "Input Menu," you will find a keyboard called "Hawaiian." You may have to scroll down a bit because it is among the other keyboards that use Unicode, which are well below those that simply use the Roman script. Selecting the check box to the left of the word "Hawaiian" activates it. You can only use this keyboard in applications that are Unicode compliant. See below.

When you click on the "Language" tab in the International System preference, you should see a number of common languages displayed, but not Hawaiian. You must click on the "Edit" button toward the middle of the pane, and scroll down to where you see ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i listed. Click on the checkbox there to active Hawaiian. In the picture below you'll see my Language pane. As I have dragged Hawaiian to the top of the list as my first preference, Mac OS will search for a language resource file called "haw.lproj" within the resources of every application I use. If it finds one, it will display that application with a Hawaiian interface. We have not yet shipped any of these resources yet, but I have several under development.

Another function that is triggered by selecting ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i in the Language pane is that the date and time formatting is in Hawaiian as well. I did nothing else to make this happen; it's all in Mac OS X.

Finally (for now), when you have selected ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i in the Language pane, the Finder and all applications that use the system's sorting routines will sort correctly for Hawaiian. See a screen show below of how this works in the Finder.

Please feel free to email me with questions and comments.