Tools, Tips & Troubleshooting

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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.

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.

I just found an option that is probably obvious to many. When you adjust your localized interface layouts using Interface Builder, you have the chance of validating the layout (shift-command-v brings up a dialog). You wil be notified of cases where content is hidden or clipped, or other similar troubles you might run into while stuffing your translations into the narrow spaces set-up for the English version.

So, my advice is to use this feature whenever you check your .nib files, to make sure everything shows the right way.

If you are working on a new translation of Camino 1.5.x, there are some .strings files that are UTF-16LE encoded, while the current version of AppleGlot only works properly with UTF-16BE files. In order to work around this problem, Wevah has written a perl script that will convert any .strings file it finds into UTF-16BE files. See Bug 382151 comment 7 for the script.

Run the script on the copy of Camino you will eventually place in _NewBase. After the files have been corrected, place that copy of Camino into your environment’s _NewBase folder and run the Initial Pass in AppleGlot.

(Bug 392918 will fix this problem permanently in time for Camino 1.6.)

updated based on information from William Xu