Re: Changing the app language
Re: Changing the app language
- Subject: Re: Changing the app language
- From: Brian Willoughby <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 28 Jul 2007 13:51:43 -0700
Hi Juan,
I suggest that you create another account for friends who prefer
Spanish. This could be a guest account with a simple password, and
you can use the multi-user login features of Mac OS X. My perception
is that people do not take enough advantage of the multi-user
features of Mac OS X, often loaning their computer to friends without
any protection of their personal data and preference settings.
While it's true that Cocoa could be updated to support real-time
changing of languages, this doesn't really map to the real world very
ideally. Individual users do not learn new languages very quickly,
so modifying the API to allow quick language selection changes seems
a rather esoteric feature. Of course, any API can be infinitely
improved, but there are good reasons for the caching behavior of
Foundation and AppKit which provide a snappier response time in the
user experience.
I think that the Finder settings should allow you to set individual
applications to Spanish, and override your general language preference.
Also, I believe that there should be a way to launch an application
from Terminal as another user (one with Spanish preferred), and that
should allow a mix of language preferences on the screen at one time.
As a developer, it would really be handy to see language changes as
flexible as you guys are wanting, so that testing multi-language
support in an application could be faster. But this one feature
seems to go against the caching nature of AppKit, and thus I wouldn't
want to lose that. Restarting an application when a person sits in
front of the computer who prefers another language is quite
acceptable. Seems reasonable to have different users testing each
language, even though there are people who are quite fluent in more
than one language.
Again, there are ways to code around the caching behavior, like
freeing all UI loaded from nibs and then reloading them. But some
caching happens in Foundation, so reloading the nib won't even help.
This whole topic still seems more educational regarding how the API
works, as opposed to anything that one might want to do in a
commercial application.
Brian Willoughby
Sound Consulting
On Jul 28, 2007, at 12:26, Juan Nunez-Iglesias wrote:
While this whole subject is an interesting learning exercise, I tend
to agree with the others who have said that there really is no
realistic situation in which a user would actually need to change the
language for a single application like you're trying to enable.
You're fighting a few central behaviors of AppKit. Maybe you could
put your time into something else a little more promising?
Actually I've often wished that I could have only selected
applications in Spanish. Also, to be able to temporarily change the
localisation of an app in order to navigate it with my Spanish friends
and family more easily. In general I work in English. So, more power
to Jeff! Unfortunately I'm a total beginner in Cocoa so I can't help
you. =)
Juan.
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