Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Minibloq.v0.81.Beta: Full Internationalization support


You can download it by clicking on the above image, or go to the Downloads page.
Also, it may be convenient reading the changelog here. We will be working on documentation about the new features the next days...

Internationalization (i18n/L10n)

Among the structural changes made to Minibloq.v0.81.Beta is the support for Internationalization/Localization (i18n/L10n for short).  In our view, i18n involves a lot of things, to ensure a good user experience with the software. So we took our time to implement it. Here are some important points about the last Minibloq version:
  • The user can change to other supported language in real time, without reinitializing the application. Just pick the desired language from a combobox, and Minibloq reloads all the necessary things.
  • Even more: new language packages can be added without the need of reinitialize the program.
  • Almost everything can be translated: from the menues to the block's tooltips, button captions and even the Help.
  • Everyone can add translations. We used open source tool which really faccilitate the task of translating. Since the i18n was implemented using the standard GNU gettext stuff, it's  even  possible to do automatic string extraction from the sources. So we hope it will be really easy to contribute to the project with translations. The most important and helpful tool used to translate was Poedit.
  • Although Minibloq now features OS's language autodetection, the user is free to manually select other languages.
Complementary with this work, we are also making a new website, with full support for internationalization. This way, even the online documentation and the examples, will be able to be easily translated by contributors to the project.  More about the new website and about how to add translations soon...

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