Month: May 2010

Dynamic Localization in JavaScript

Update: Get Localization for Websites is a dynamic JavaScript library / service that keeps your website translated. 

Eli Grey released week ago a great library for localizing JavaScript code. Today, we want to support this great library by providing support for it.

Check out the demo. It is same demo as in Eli’s site but with one change (in addition to the language selection) that we provide a compatible JavaScript file that works with l10n.js so basically this is enough:

http://www.getlocalization.com/api/js/localizations/?product=L10NDemo

This allows translators and developers to manage translations in the Get Localization service. L10NDemo is a public project so you can freely participate in translating it into your language in the Get Localization editor.

Get Localization is free for OSS developers and we also have premium plans offering additional features for professional software development projects. We are also open for feedback so let us hear from you.

Free Beta available. Calling all freelancers!

We had successful sprint and we released couple of important improvements yesterday. This means we’ve achieved long-waited Beta status and we are seriously open for business!

We got lot of feedback regarding “company profile”, it was slowing registration process and was really not that useful. So we’ve removed it. Now when you register, you basically give your product details and that’s it. We really need to embrace our slogan “Making localization easy” in to every detail.

Second big improvement is an asynchronous way of uploading strings. Now you don’t need to wait when you upload localization file containing large amount of strings, it will happen on the background and you will be notified as soon as the process is ready.

Third huge improvement is an indexed translation memory. Our system will keep translator automatically aware of used terms and will provide suggestions based on previous translations. This is especially useful for crowdsourcing where multiple people can work with single translation.

Beta is now completely free of charge as well. We are not planning to start charging of it anytime soon so don’t worry. However we are a company like you so you may expect this to happen someday but how it will happen is completely open. For open source and non-profit projects we will be always free.

We’ve also opened sign-up form for professional translators. If you are freelancer, please submit your profile and you will have an unique opportunity to get cool projects from our developers with quite small effort.

Controlling crowds: Creating great software

Crowd control has been troublesome issue for governments, event organizers, bouncers, police, you name it since the birth of human race. For most of the people, crowd control sounds more negative than positive and is almost a synonym for force. But control by force has never worked out and all the attempts are more or less backfired.

So what is the best way to control crowds? Simple, keep them comfortable and happy. This applies to software as well, think your users as a crowd you need to control. You want to lead them to a direction you think is the best by providing best possible solution. This is not same as making every wish come true. It’s about providing consistent, easy to use software that suits their needs and solves their problem in an elegant way. Adding features after features is not often the way to go. It eventually comes to situation where you are trying to “force” more people to use your software without really thinking of your product as a whole. And yes… all the attempts to force people have always more or less backfired. So always think of your incentives before adding new features.

This all comes to the fact that you can’t please everyone. So stop trying. Cherish the crowd that is happy using your product and make it even better. This way, instead of paying of marketing you earn your visibility in media. Word of mouth is the most powerful way of selling things so use that as your meter and motivator when creating products.

CLDR Project

CLDR (Common Locale Data Repository) is a project that aims to collect, maintain and provide locale data needed in software. It is hosted by Unicode Consortium and supported huge amount of companies and organizations.

Data they provide for each locale:

  • Date/time formats
  • Number/currency formats
  • Measurement System
  • Collation specifications (sorting, searching, matching)
  • Translated names for languages, territory, script, timezones and currencies
  • Script and characters used by a language

We are really interested to heavily support this project and the integration of CLDR data is in high priority. Basically this means that number formatting, currencies, language names etc. will be automatically translated in your project. If you’ve any other ideas where we could use this data in order to help you guys, please let us know!

Finland is warmest country in Europe

Europe Weather Map by YLE

Highly unusual but Finland is today warmest country in whole Europe. Traditionally we Finns tend to joke that we’ve long winter and less snowy summer. As normally we get these kind of heat waves around July if we’re lucky. Needless to say that people have taken everything out of this warm weather. Beaches, parks and terraces are packed of sun bathers. It’s also very common that people leave the city and head to their summer cottages to relax. Besides that Helsinki is an excellent and active city in the summer time. Love it.

Well, enough blogging for me. I guess I should be enjoying of the weather as well!

Get Localization provides a professional translation and crowdsourcing services for businesses and consumers. Check our software!

Embrace the change

Development of web and mobile products and services is getting easier and faster all the time. Tools such as Ruby on Rails, Django and Qt are affecting our lives radically, making a change to a product basically piece of cake. So it is extremely important in order to have a competitive edge, to follow these new technologies and take most out of them. If you don’t do that, be prepared to face a new competition that for sure will. If you are not able to change, you are not going to win this game. Developers are aware of this but is the rest of the organization?

Most of the organizations, even in Agile world are only measuring the time how long it takes from developer to do the change instead of focusing on the actual implications of the change. Some estimations say that project contains only one percentage of time which is actually development work that matters. Rest of the 99% is waste of time. Yes, nothing else than wasting time and money. So what we could do about it?

It’s all about change management. Everybody knows how that works in theory. But how to really apply good change management process to actual practical work? Even most of the developers don’t do this voluntarily. Think about for example the unit testing, most of the developers are not doing them if you don’t explicitly order them to do. This is because most of the people are lazy. They don’t want to take preemptive actions to do something that is maybe valuable in the future because they just want to survive. It’s all about surviving to the next deadline.

So how to fix this? Development itself is not the problem. Like I said, there is tools for that. It only requires that they are used. They are proven, they are working and used by the best already. Wonder why they are best? They are focusing to their core business. If you are a handyman, you are not going build your own tools, you go to the local hardware store and buy them. So why this is so difficult when we develop software, why we still do it all the time?