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On locale maintenance. February 15, 2007

Posted by andy in : coding, screengrab , 2 comments

I just had a thought.

The whole point of locales is to externalise the language from the extension code into translatable blocks that reside in a separate area. Currently this resides inside the extension, but why not have it reside on a remote server and cache it locally?

Obviously your extension could ship with whatever translations it has, but if the person using it was French and you didn’t include an fr-FR version then it could connect to a server (let’s say Babelzilla) and request it from their servers (Babelzilla hold all of the translations anyway). If it was there, it would be downloaded and incorporated into your extension somehow (this bit is where the magic happens).

Translations would be tied to a particular version, so when a developer releases a new version, you could log in to their system and roll forward all translations or deprecate them. Then any new translations could be easily made and added to your extension without you actually having to do anything.

If people wanted a particular translation, then they could request it through the extension that managed all of this dynamic locale stuff, or they could just write a translation and submit it.

I think this is a great idea. I must ask Goofy what he thinks.

Pending Screengrab release

Posted by andy in : coding, screengrab , 6 comments

So I’m working on a new Screengrab release (which will coincide with changing the look of the website, so that it’s a little less bloggy and a little more about Screengrab).

The new release will feature some new features and bug fixes.

1) Fixed horizontal scrolling bug. Somehow horizontal scrolling got lost along the way. Either I stuffed up or it was changed in Firefox. Either way, it’s fixed now.

2) Grabs using Canvas. Firefox 2.0 (possibly 1.5) has full canvas support (notably toDataUrl) so I can now use the canvas instead of Java to do the grabs. We lose the funky scrolling around the page, but we gain much better performance. The Java version will still be kept as an option, as it is required in order to take complete grabs of pages that use plugins (swf).

3) Copy to clipboard. This feature will only work using Canvas, but you can now copy an image to the clipboard instead of saving it to disk.

4) Select a portion to grab. There is now a drag box allowing you to select only a portion of the window to take a shot of.

5) File type choice. This isn’t done yet, but it should make it in. You will be able to select whether you want a JPG or a PNG - we’re limited by what Firefox provides in this regard.

6) File extension bug. There’s currently a problem with ever growing extensions on files. I’ll try to squash this one.

The new release requires changes to lots of text, which will obsolete many of the current locales. I can’t decide whether to hold back the release while I wait for translations or to just go ahead and inconvenience a whole bunch of users.

People don’t talk about how annoying locale maintenance is, but it does hold development back, which is frustrating. I personally feel bad when I go to the Babelzilla guys and say “I’ve re-written the entire interface. Can you please re-write it 15 times too?”. Obviously I completely support it (I don’t want everyone speaking English. Otherwise it would be no fun visiting other countries) I just wish there was an easier way to do locales than bundling them into the extension itself. You have to make a new release every time you want to include a new locale.