Re: Can the OS X Installer help us decide which language a customer is using?
Re: Can the OS X Installer help us decide which language a customer is using?
- Subject: Re: Can the OS X Installer help us decide which language a customer is using?
- From: Mike Fischer <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 24 May 2008 00:14:12 +0200
Am 23.05.2008 um 21:05 schrieb Jim Dodd <email@hidden>:
I have been using PackageMaker for a few years and it has worked
well for what we needed. Now, we have changed our application to be
available in two languages (more will follow) and I need to be able
to load the appropriate manual and help files based on the language
the customer is using.
The application itself is no problem because it is built with
Resource Bundles and chooses the correct strings for dialogs and
messages correctly. But we don't want to copy all the available
manuals and help documents in each language to the customer's
disk.We would just like to copy the French manual and French help
if the user is running the Installer in French, for instance.
There are a couple of situations where your thinking will cause
problems:
- What if the administrator installs the app and her user account is
set to a different language than that of the actual user?
- What if multiple users using your app on the same machine are using
different localizations?
- I often keep around a user account named "English" to be able to
send bug reports, etc. to the authors including screenshots in their
native language. If the app installer had only installed my native
language (German) then I would not be able to do that.
I'm familiar with PackageMaker allowing for ReadMe, License etc
files in different languages to localize the Installer itself and
the fact that InstallationCheck and VolumeCheck can have their
strings in different languages that are chosen at runtime.. But is
this information (which language is being used by the Installer)
available for our preflight, postinstall and postupdate scripts?
You could probably hack something like this by removing all localized
files for localizations that don't match the current one in the
postflight script. But this is going against the grain. It could also
be dangerous because the localization falls back to the
CFBundleDevelopmentRegion if the exact localization can't be found.
So you'd also have to keep that around.
Why not just tell the user in your ReadMe or other documentation that
they can reduce the size of the app by using the Finder Information
window and manually deleting any languages they don't need? They can
only do that if they are authorized to modify the app of course
(which is good).
Or you could make the localizations other than your
CFBundleDevelopmentRegion optional and package them in optional sub-
packages of a meta package.
HTH
Mike
--
Mike Fischer Softwareentwicklung, EDV-Beratung
Schulung, Vertrieb
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