Re: Localizing about files
Re: Localizing about files
- Subject: Re: Localizing about files
- From: email@hidden
- Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2002 10:38:04 -0800
What's the problem in just providing a folder "Read Me First", which
would contain "English.rtf", "Czech.rtf", "Hebrew.rtf", "Bantu.rtf",
"Swahili.rtf", "Esperanto.rtf", "Latin.rtf", and whatever else you
like?
One, it requires the user to find the proper file. Given that the
computer already knows the user's preferred language(s), it should do
this for the user.
Two, it scales very poorly. If the app is localized to a dozen
languages, it's a bit of an annoying search to find the right file.
If it's localized to 50, it's totally unacceptable.
The drawback I'm seeing with using a custom Application is that you
would need to provide printing features, then Drag and Drop features,
then Save As... file feature to have the same feature Preview or
TextEdit provides when reading a .pdf or .rtf Read-Me file.
Of course, Cocoa can provide this easily but yet, it's still one more
application to code (and support).
An idea I had for dealing with this is that the application would just
select the proper localized RTF file from inside its bundle, message the
Finder to open that file in the preferred app for RTF (probably
TextEdit), and then quit. It would suppress its dock icon display,
would have no menu bar, etc. -- entirely faceless. So from the user's
point of view, they would have double-clicked on the "about" file (it
could even have an RTF document icon, if I wanted to really try to
conceal what was going on, but I'm not sure that's appropriate), and
TextEdit would have magically chosen the right language to display.
I must say I'm surprised by the pushback I've been getting on this
idea, though, both from this list and from others I've spoken to. It
seemed like a clear win to me, but the feedback I'm getting from people
is that they're just fundamentally uncomfortable with the idea of the
readme being an executable file, presumably for reasons of security and
of predictability of behavior. I'm starting to have second thoughts on
doing this; apparently most people would actually prefer a big folder
with 15 different localized readme files.
More feedback on this issue, pro and con, is welcome -- I'm very
interested in understanding more how people feel about this. Reply by
private e-mail please, I'll summarize to the list if I get enough
interesting replies.
Ben Haller
Stick Software
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