Meet Any.DO

This time we’d like to present to you Any.DO, an app that was recently listed by Business Insider as one of the hot apps right now. We talked with Yoni Lindenfeld, Any.DO’s VP of Engineering.

 

 

 

 

Q1. Tell us about Any.DO!

At Any.DO we focus our efforts on building simple yet effective productivity tools with a big focus on mobile platforms. Our award winning To-Do application was launched in November 2011 and since than has been downloaded by millions of users. The application has been listed as one of the best apps for 2012 by Apple and has been featured a couple of times in Google play. Our vision through our set of products is to help our users get their things done in smart contextual ways. We are building all kinds of smart tools (some of them yet to be released) to make this vision come true.

Q2. Please tell us about yourself.

I am one of the co-founders and the VP of Engineering here at Any.DO. I come from a technological background and take care of the entire development efforts of the company. Our localization process was

first based mostly on professional translators, making it a time consuming and expensive process. I was looking for an alternative service that will allow us to leverage our big community of users to help us localize our products faster, cheaper and to more languages.

Q3. How are you using Get Localization?

We have been using Get Localization for a few months now, and the results are amazing. We already got more than a hundred translators on the system translating our products and adding new languages that weren’t supported yet. We still can’t base our entire localization process on the community but hopefully as more and more translators join we will be less and less dependent on professional translation services.

Q4. Would you have localization tips or best practices that you would
like to share?

My biggest tip would be to try and get as many translators to the system as possible – our way to do it is to actively approach our most dedicated users suggesting they become a translator. We also wanted a better way to access our group of translators so we created a Google group for all of them so we can announce new releases of the app that requires translation (this works great – maybe in the future this will be a part of the Get Localization service).

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks Yoni for sharing your experiences with Get Localization!

Please check out Any.DO or why not support them by signing up for translations.

Introducing Get Localization for Mac (BETA)

No more ibtool, genstrings or dragging xib and strings files around. Get Localization for Mac is here!

Get Localization for Mac is by far the simplest way to localize your iOS and Mac OS X apps that have been developed using Xcode. It manages all the files and it generates the strings files from your Objective-C and XIB files and updates them. It also syncs them between Get Localization and your Xcode project. Just select your .xcodeproj file, log-in and select the project where you wish to sync your strings files and you are ready to go.

But first let’s walk through how to internationalize your iOS or Mac OS X app. If you are familiar with internalization for iOS and OS X you can skip this part.

Prepare Your App for Localization

Objective-C (.m and .mpp files)

In order to localize your app you simply need to wrap all the hard-coded strings with an NSLocalizedString function call in your Objective-C files. For example:

[alert setInformativeText:NSLocalizedString(@"Hello World", 
@"This is a comment, it appears in Get Localization editor")];

XIB files

Get Localization for Mac will automatically manage all your XIB files and related strings files. All you have to do is to select  in Xcode which XIB files to localize.

1. First select the Xib file and then open File Inspector (typically the first document icon to the right, see screenshot)
2. Click the ‘Localize’ button. When Xcode asks if you want to localize, choose ‘yes’. It’s also recommended to select English here as a language as the BETA version only supports English as a master language at the moment.  You don’t need to add any languages here, rest will happen magically.
3. This will move the selected xib file to en.proj directory. This is normal and required by the process. Language specific folders and xib files are built automatically for you by Get Localization for Mac when you choose to sync the files.

That’s it. Now your app is ready for localization.

Localization Made Easy with Get Localization for Mac

Get Localization for Mac automates everything. It will

• Configure your Xcode project properly
• Generate Localizable.strings files from your Objective-C files
• Generate XIB specific strings files from each XIB that is marked for localization in Xcode (resides in en.lproj folder)
• Update your existing translations to Get Localization if they are available in your Xcode project
• Add these files to the Xcode project automatically (no need to drag’n’drop every file manually)

You can add multiple Xcode projects to Get Localization for Mac to sync them easily.

Just drag’n’drop your Xcode project to a new empty Get Localization project or choose any existing project you have access to. If you have any existing translations in your project, they are updated as well. Please note that if your project is big, it may take a moment to process all your files when uploading for the first time.

You can choose which languages to sync to your Xcode project. Just simply click “Sync” and  latest translations are updated to your app and new strings files are generated and sent to translation.

Try It Out – Download the Beta

Please note that Get Localization for Mac is an early beta version. It will be later available through Mac App Store but now during the public beta phase you can download it via the following link.

Download Get Localization for Mac BETA

Please report all the bugs or problems that you may find by creating a ticket in our support system.

Localizing iPhone applications

Translating your iPhone application is becoming more important day by day. US is still the biggest market but others are growing fast. Based on AdMob report, iPhone is growing in Europe and Asia faster than in US. In Japan alone, growth has been 350% from January to November 2009.

iPhone usage, November 2009 (AdMob)

Currently iPhone is available in 96 countries. Looking the pie on left, about 65% of AdMob (Note! These numbers are based on web usage, not the actual sales) traffic is coming from English speaking countries. Rest 35% is heavily fragmented and basically covers rest of the world. From this you could probably figure out already that you should localize your app at least to French, Germany and possibly Japan. You may even think that it does not make sense to localize at all as those three countries will cover only 13% of the cake. And I would say that you might be right if you think about localization like you do now.

Did you notice those others? Others is the second biggest part of this pie with 17% share. It doesn’t make sense to localize your application to these “others” as it means tens of different languages. It would cost you quite a lot in case you go with that route. Well adding up those 17% with other non-english countries, you end up to 35%. Nice number and in actual devices it means 27 million devices (total 78m). In potential customers it is 27 million potential customers more for your application. Our solution to make this happen with minimal effort and costs is crowdsourcing. It’s really difficult and expensive to handle all of those languages as the market is so highly fragmented with any traditional methods.

Basically by crowdsourcing we mean outsourcing the localization work to your users. With our platform, it is possible just to upload your original English content to our web service and give the link to your users. They will take care of the rest. You just download ready-made translations and compile them into your application or use our API’s to fetch them over the air. Let your users know about the possibility and they will translate if they like your product. Even if the product is commercial, it works (we’ve done it, see the previous posts).

Our goal is to take care of the whole localization process so that we help your users to do translations like they were professionals. Trust your users, they’re using your product which means they trust you. They know how your product works as they are the actual users. Because of that, your community can take care of the translation, validation and even localization testing on your behalf. This also means that you don’t have to guess the languages you translate, your community will translate the languages they need. This is how you turn your translation projects to lean projects.

Try it out at http://www.getlocalization.com. We’ve 30-day free trial included in all our plans.