Camino Localization Community (CaminoL10n)

Thanks to Russian contributor Igor Pryadkin, we have a published draft of our very first iLocalize tutorial.
Check it out and leave comments at: http://cl10n.rwx.it/ilocalize-introduction

A short bulletin to tell about things going on among l10n teams.

- Camino 1.6 is "string-frozen". nothing should change in .strings & .nib files until the release, so it's a very good time to work on localization, both for existing teams and for new ones. You can download a nightly build from here: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/camino/nightly/latest-1.6-M1.8/ and...

- ... and... well the next news would be that finally we have an Intel-aware build of AppleGlot out there: http://developer.apple.com/internationalization/download/ (Apple Developer Connection free account needed to download), but...

- but still there are some flaws, one of them being that ADViewer is and will remain broken on Leopard. AppleGlot's further development is uncertain (and will likely take ages between releases, if any), so some of us decided to give a try at alternatives, namely iLocalize (http://www.ilocalize.com/ilocalize/), a tool that does most of the things done by the now-odd couple AppleGlot+ADViewer, in quite a polished way and, by the way, it has now a free licensing option, friendly to open-source based projects like Camino.

We're still trying to figure out how good localized Camino packages come out of it. We're working on it and on some kind of introductory tutorial. Stay tuned.

The release notes for the upcoming Camino 1.5.5 maintenance release have been checked in. All teams that have already worked on Camino 1.5.x are requested to update the release notes translation as soon as possible. Please help us fill the matrix below with "OK"!

Here's the bug bearing the final release notes.
And attached to this post, you'll find the file itself, for your comfort.

You can find attached to this post the complete Sparkle source, as checked out from the project's repository. Look through the folders and find your [language].lproj, so that you can check the status of the translation and eventually put it into your localized Camino.

Sparkle is the software update framework used in Camino 1.6+. It comes already translated in many languages.

The new Sparkle update system worked as expected and notified me (using Camino 1.6a1) that betas were available.
In the meantime, Smokey provided us with a possible fix for troubles affecting the old CaminoFramework+Palette package (it worked OK for me with Leopard on Intel, we're waiting some positive results on PPC before releasing the new package on this site).

I then went to my AppleGlot Camino environment and updated the Italian l10n to 1.6b2. First, thanks to the new Universal Binary framework, AppleGlot stopped complaining and run quietly all its passes. Here are the casualties that I found after the AppleGlot treatment. This list is meant as an help for other localizers, anyway, until better AppleGlot days, its better to plan a thorough package inspection everytime a l10n is updated: results may vary among different languages.

The development team is preparing the release of a beta version of Camino 1.6 (or ✈ that is...).
You can find more information about how things are going in this post by Smokey:
http://www.ardisson.org/afkar/2008/01/14/camino-2008-week-2/
(you might have read it already, if you wisely subscribed to http://caminoplanet.org RSS feed, which also magically provides notice of posts from this very site)

Everyone here at Caminol10n is strongly encouraged to start working on Camino 1.6, and NOW is the right time to do it. You may download a "latest-1.6" nightly build and do your thing with AppleGlot.

Here you'll find the bug containing the finalized release notes for Camino 1.6b1.

You can do that even if you are new to Caminol10n; in this case I suggest you follow simple rules:
- Do that on a PPC box, with Panther or Tiger OS and XCode 2.5
- Find a fellow reviewer for your work; of course he should speak natively your language and have a Mac able to run Camino. Other than that, nothing is needed
- Read the preliminary AppleGlot tutorial

Thanks to everyone who'll be joining the Camino 1.6 effort!

Starting with a possibly complete l10n of 1.5.4, here's a quick checklist of things to look after inside the package, after you ran an AppleGlot complete routine. AppleGlot will complain about nibtool errors but it mostly gets the job done, as long as you have installed XCode 2.5 and have created a symlink for nibtool:
ln -s /XCode\ 2.5/usr/bin/nibtool /usr/bin/nibtool

• Check wether the Localizable.strings file inside the Talkback package is OK, otherwise pick one from previous versions (1 file)
• Check the .strings files inside MacOS/plugins packages and fix version mismatches (3 files)
• Check all the .nib files for the preference panes, looking for layout tweaks and a string to translate in the Navigation/General prefpane; don't forget to use the validate layout function (8 files)
• Check the MainMenu.nib file and see if the View menu is localized (1 file)
• Check the main Localizable.strings file and look for empty translated strings - there should be only 2 about "Script" (1 file)

All in all, it's just 14 files to check and fix in very limited parts. Of course, we're eagerly waiting on the AppleGlot update that should fix all this.

FINAL NOTE FOR THOSE STARTING A L10N FROM SCRATCH

It's strongly suggested to use a PPC/10.4 box. Period.

Back in 2004, there was a bug submission about the localizability of undo/redo menu items, which affected languages that didn't have OS X localized.
Could someone in that situation show up and give advice by commenting on the bug?
Read more and comment: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=275402

http://caminobrowser.org/blog/2007/#donations
This is interesting news, especially because of Mozilla's offer to 3x every donation made before year's end.

"Mozilla is a community, and you are a vital part of it.
With the Community Survey Program, we're creating a knowledge base about our communities, learning about your opinions, feelings, and ideas."
http://blog.mozilla.com/communitysurveys/

Mozilla Foundation, mainly through its European branch, is exploring one of its best values: the communities.
The first steps look like they're watching especially local communities, which makes Caminol10n peculiar, as "glocal" as we are.
However, if you take part in a local Mozilla-related community as I do (and as I think anyone here should, where available), I encourage you to take the survey (http://surveys.mozilla-europe.org/?id=1#takeit - I can't say for how many languages it's localized) and to comment here as well, with any development ideas and suggestions you have for our community.
Thank you.