Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year everyone!

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When I first started out localizing my first iPhone application, I went bananas. Unlike most of the developer resources available for programming on an Apple infrastructure, this feature seemed so confused in documentation and poorly understood by the community. All I wanted was to have multiple languages on my application, relative to the user’s preferences, just by using NSLocalizedString, and editing the translation files.

Please note that there is a whole lot more to localization beyond having different languages on your application. I’m not going to cover that on this post. I’m also not going to talk about localizing XIB files.

Goal

This guide will help you localize strings included in your code (using NSLocalizedString) as well as making the translation process incremental (without ever losing the previous translations made).

Problem

I’m going to talk about the surprise I had when I started localizing my application: the Localizable.strings files that got generated using Apple’s tool, genstrings, overwrite the previous translations, instead of properly merging them with the new changes. Since I needed to translate as I was developing the application, this meant that I had to merge the files by hand at every step of the translation process (always being careful not to lose the previous translations). This just wouldn’t work.

Solution

And so, I’ve made a Python script that does just what we need: it generates new translation files, merges them with the previous translations and keeps copies of all those steps, just in case anything goes wrong.

Step by Step

Here’s how it works:

1. go into your XCode project folder and create xx.lproj folders inside, one for each language you would like (using ISO 639-1 and ISO 639-2 codes). For example, to have your application in English, French and German, you would create three folders: en.lproj, fr.lproj and de.lproj;
2. put my script localize.py inside the XCode project folder (it is being hosted on my github repository);
3. simply run ./localize.py on the Terminal, from the XCode project folder and your files will be created on the first run, and merged on subsequent runs.
4. after running the script for the first time you should have your Localizable.strings files inside each language folder. To make them work with your application, just add them to your XCode project.

Notes

The script always leaves two files behind, per language: Localizable.strings.old and Localizable.strings.new. These are the two files that got merged to create the brand new Localizable.strings file. They might come in handy for some troubleshooting. By not adding them into the XCode project and (if applicable) by adding them onto your favourite revision control program’s ignore list, they cause no trouble at all.

I hope this helps someone, just like it has been helping me ever since I created it.

If you have any comments, questions, bug reports, please let me know in the comments section.

I’ve just released something that I’ve been working on the past few months. It started out as a way to learn iPhone development but then the idea got stuck in my head as something that might just be useful to a lot of people, so I’ve decided to complete the project and release it as a paid app on the App Store.

The name is SongSketch and it’s supposed to help you catalog all those songs you create, if you’re a guitar/piano/etc. player. For more information, refer to the official website: http://songsketch.joaomoreno.com/.

Please note that all the application and web design was done by Nuno Coelho. Give him a visit, he’s an awesome designer.

Cool, breezy, clear winter skies right onto your desktop.

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Um pedido de desculpas àqueles que o usam tanto como uma maneira de publicar melhor os seus blogs e àqueles que o usam como fonte de leitura no dia-a-dia. Foi bom enquanto durou.

Grey like Swiss weather and pierced like Portuguese economy.

Or is it grey like Portuguese economy and pierced like Swiss cheese?

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The only thing it does yet is cycle through the whole hue range very slowly, so it gives a nice smoothly changing environment to the room. It draws its power from a standard wall socket, although I left the USB cable dangling in order to just my laptop whenever and reprogram it at will.

The assembly is fairly simple, all you need is:

• Arduino (I’m using the Diecimila);
• RGB LED (I bought this one);
• some 100 Ohm resistors (I bought these, although if you know a bit something about LEDs you know that different LED colors require different voltages, as such, in order to get better results you could use different resistors);
• Arduino compatible wall socket;
• one IKEA lamp!

All you need to do is connect each color of the LED to an analog out pin on the Arduino, and do some code!

If someone has any good ideas on what else to do with the lamp, please let me know!

In few words, my Macbook Pro just went from perfectly fine to not working at all, a few days after installing Snow Leopard. Technically, the screen does not light up at all. Only after certain acts such as running it on Target Disk Mode or removing the battery for more than 15 seconds; and this isn’t even linear, it only happens sometimes. Mind you, I would love not to blame the new Operating System but there are no evidences that it wasn’t the culprit, mainly because the laptop was impeccable before the upgrade.

Luckily I’m not the only one, apparently. Here’s the Apple Forums thread, in which we are still waiting for an Apple reply. And since I can only bring it into an Apple Store next week, I will have to wait a little longer to get a fix on this. Until then, I’m out of laptop.

More will follow.

Samoa was a German colony until occupied by New Zealand at the beginning of the First World War. Until September 2009 it maintained the German practice of driving on the right-hand side of the road. This practice had been in place for more than a century. A plan to drive on the left was first announced by the Samoan government in September 2007 and was confirmed on 18 April 2008 when Samoa’s parliament passed the Road Transport Reform Act 2008. [...]

Prime Minister Tuilaepa Aiono Sailele Malielegaoi says the purpose of adopting left-hand traffic is to allow Samoans to use cheaper right-hand drive vehicles sourced from Australia, New Zealand, or Japan, and so that the large number of Samoans living in Australasia can drive on the same side of the road when they visit their country of origin. He aims to reduce reliance on expensive, left-hand drive imports from America. [...]

The change came into force following a radio announcement at 5.50 local time (16.50 GMT) which halted traffic and an announcement at 6.00 local time (17.00 GMT) for traffic to switch from the right to the left-hand side of the road.

from Wikipedia.

Isn’t it funny how economic pressures can change the way we act? And how desperate times can change the way we think? And also, how brilliant ideas are often simple?

I really love this one, guys and girls.

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