Friday, April 6, 2012

Greenwich

FadingRed (via Daniel Jalkut):

Greenwich is a Cocoa framework designed to make localization of Cocoa applications extremely easy for developers and translators. We've made every step of the process seamless, so you can focus on creating great software for more people.

This open-source project addresses one of the most longstanding limitations/flaws in Apple’s developer tools. Localization should be much easier than it is, both at the level of communicating with translators and within an Xcode project. So I like that they’re doing something, although I’m a bit skeptical of the dynamic localization approach (contra actual localized xib/nib files). Greenwich seems to rely on string keys (rather than ID numbers), and it inserts the localized strings into the views at runtime. I’ve used apps that do this, and they tend to be characterized by either truncated strings or excess padding. However, in theory Cocoa Auto Layout’s resizing and constraints system should make dynamic localization much more capable than in the past.

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