07.05.07

Troubleshoot Camino update: validation and localization

Posted in Camino, Software at 12:32 am by Smokey

Real software developers, at least the hip ones, or the good ones, or the open source/free software ones, have “devblogs” where they keep their users updated on the latest news as they work on new versions of their programs. As we know, I don’t really develop software, but from time-to-time I produce something useful, which I guess means I need to remember to occasionally turn افكار و احلام into a devblog….

It’s been some time since there has been a release of Troubleshoot Camino, largely because there aren’t many more features one could add, and also because there have been no reported bugs (yay!). I had actually been working on fixing one “major” missing feature, version validation, when Stuart announced the “playing nicely in other people’s sandboxes” campaign, so I quickly added the CAMINO_DISABLE_HACKS variable for version 1.1 instead. Following that, Troubleshoot Camino languished on the run up to Camino 1.5.

I picked up the version validation code again the other day and updated it to take into account the “new” Camino 1.5 version number, and today I spent a good bit of time integrating the code and squashing all (?) of the remaining bugs. Now Troubleshoot Camino will prevent you (me ) from launching versions of Camino that don’t work with the underlying fresh profile mechanism; mainly this will be useful for QA when attempting to find a regression range for a bug.

The other big feature missing from Troubleshoot Camino was the ability to localize the messages that are displayed when it is running. I had, like most bad software developers, deliberately left this out of 1.0 and 1.1 so that I could get the program out there (in my “defense,” those versions only have two messages—one of which should never appear—and when Troubleshoot Camino 1.0 and 1.1 were released, there were no multilingual versions of Camino available that supported the underlying fresh profile mechanism). This morning I almost recommended a French user try Troubleshoot Camino to test something, and I remembered I still hadn’t written the localization code. I spent most of today fixing that. (Unlike Cocoa apps where the OS handles the vast majority of the infrastructure for localizable code—getting the user’s preferred language and looking up strings in that language—in plain old AppleScript, you have to write that all yourself.)

Before I release Troubleshoot Camino with these nifty new features, I’d like to get a good collection of localizations. If you’d like to translate Troubleshoot Camino into your language, please take a look at the short guide and then send me your translation. (There’s a pretty bad sample French translation in the guide that I had hacked up when testing the new code; I apologize to my Francophone users for massacring la langue française and welcome a real French translation.) Translations will be warmly welcomed; to prevent duplicated efforts, you can leave a comment below if you are working on translating Troubleshoot Camino into a certain language. Many thanks for your help!

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