Conboy - Note Taking Application (Tomboy clone) - Page 7 - maemo.org

conny | # 61 | 2009-06-05, 16:24 | Report

Due to a user request I just released version 0.4.5.

The big changes for 0.5 are not ready yet, so there are only two small improvements:

Tomboy tags (aka notebooks) are now preserved
French translation added. Thanks fpp!

Enjoy!

fpp | # 62 | 2009-06-05, 19:06 | Report

My pleasure. This reminds me of something I meant to say though, about localization systems.

From the .po files I gather you are using GNU GetText. While I understand this is the "standard", proven, industrial-strength, OSS way of doing things, and is probably the right one for large-to-huge projects with many strings and many people working together, from an amateur's point of view I've always had a feeling of total overkill for small apps with a single lead developer and a few translators.

Two things in particular strike me as totally unfit (and unhelpful) for the sort of informal, one-off, ad-hoc community work that's happening here :

One is that the .po files are needlessly obfuscated when you edit them as text, and may confuse or deter non-technical persons who would like to help and could otherwise provide high-quality translations (which programmers often don't :-). Requiring them to install, learn and use one of the specialized .po editors would be even worse, of course.

Second, integration of those user-provided files requires intervention by the programmer(s) : compilation, repackaging, new release. That's more work for the lone developer (who should be coding :-), and users need to wait for that release to use the contributor's work.

In contrast, in the past I have translated (or helped translate, and still do) some non-trivial apps using a much simpler, quicker and user-friendly scheme. I also tend to use it in my own (trivial) code.

Basically you just have a plain text file for each language, with a line for each string like :
"English text"= "Text translated in another language"

You don't have to change existing code, just define your own _() local function that uses that file's content as a hash table (or Python dictionary) depending on locale.

Just about anyone can pick up such a file, correct someone else's mistake, or look for empty strings at the end in a new version and complete them, or even start a whole new language.

Moreover, the translator can see the result of his work immediately on his local installation of the app, and correct it if need be. He can make it available to others himself, or and/or send it to the developer who just has to put it up on his web page, and everyone can use the new translation immediately without waiting for a new release.

One example is very well known, it's the SciTe text editor by Neil Hodgson :
http://groups.google.com/group/scite...b/translations

ELOG is much less famous, but still a clever and very impressive app by Stefan Ritt :
https://midas.psi.ch/elog/

At least one Python Web framework provides such a facility by default (plus some administrative web forms to make it even easier) : it's web2py by Massimo di Pierro (the one I presented at the Berlin summit last year)
http://www.web2py.com/

Of course GetText is a lot more powerful (and in some ways optimized) than these simple hacks, but the point is that these apps don't actually need that level of sophistication, and neither does Conboy. I believe making translation work simpler in this way would benefit both you and us (translators or users).

Sorry for the rant :-)

The Following User Says Thank You to fpp For This Useful Post:
conny

conny | # 63 | 2009-06-07, 13:57 | Report

A smaller/simpler l10n framework would probably be sufficient for Conboy and I agree that it would be nice if it would be easier to create translations. The reason I'm using gettext is, that more or less everyone is using it and I was just too lazy to look for anything else

Sorry for not going into more details, but I'm really short on time right now. For Conboy it looks like that: If anyone is interested in replacing gettext with something better, I'll happily accept patches but it's not likely that I'll do it my self anytime soon. I'm just too busy with other stuff. Sorry.

It looks the the community translations project has some good points too. Maybe it would make sense to repost your thoughts there?!

fpp | # 64 | 2009-06-07, 15:43 | Report

It's okay, I was just venting a pet peeve of mine :-)

The community translation project you point to, however, seems like the perfect counter-example : such a large-scale effort, distributed across many apps and contributors, probably *needs* an industrial-strength tool to remain manageable...

qwerty12 | # 65 | 2009-06-07, 15:57 | Report

conny, hi, just wondering if you've thought about using the thumbable scrollbar (looking at the amount of hildonness to be found in this, that's probably a yes

)?

Code:

--- conboy-0.4.5.orig/src/interface.c
+++ conboy-0.4.5/src/interface.c
@@ -447,6 +447,7 @@
 	scrolledwindow1 = gtk_scrolled_window_new(NULL, NULL);
 	gtk_scrolled_window_set_policy(GTK_SCROLLED_WINDOW (scrolledwindow1), GTK_POLICY_AUTOMATIC, GTK_POLICY_AUTOMATIC);
 #endif
+	hildon_helper_set_thumb_scrollbar(scrolledwindow1, TRUE);
 	gtk_widget_show(scrolledwindow1);
 	gtk_box_pack_start(GTK_BOX (vbox1), scrolledwindow1, TRUE, TRUE, 0);

Did the above and I get this:

IMHO, it's better because it's nice being able to scroll my notes with the big scrollbar when I don't have my stylus in my hand. Just a thought.

Either way, this program is just too awesome for note-keeping! I don't even use Tomboy on a desktop but I find this too useful

Last edited by qwerty12; 2009-06-07 at 16:00.

The Following User Says Thank You to qwerty12 For This Useful Post:
conny

conny | # 66 | 2009-06-08, 08:52 | Report

Originally Posted by qwerty12 View Post

conny, hi, just wondering if you've thought about using the thumbable scrollbar (looking at the amount of hildonness to be found in this, that's probably a yes

)?

Good question! Yea I remember that I was thinking about using it, but I don´t remember why I didn´t used it

Maybe I wanted to make it user configurable but then was busy with other stuff. I´ll put it on my list again. Thanks for the reminder!

Originally Posted by qwerty12 View Post

Either way, this program is just too awesome for note-keeping! I don't even use Tomboy on a desktop but I find this too useful

Thanks a lot!

The Following User Says Thank You to conny For This Useful Post:
qwerty12

conny | # 67 | 2009-06-11, 17:07 | Report

Originally Posted by Jaffa View Post

conny, do you fancy writing an article (preferably one we can syndicate to planet.m.o) about your experiences Fremantlising an existing UI; and what the new API's like to work with? (Your posts on maemo-developers made fascinating reading as it evolved, but having a retrospective - complete with screenshots - would be handy to other developers (IMHO) and a good ad for your app ;-))

The initial version is online. Tomorrow I´ll add screenshots. Further discussion and a link are here: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=295680

The Following 2 Users Say Thank You to conny For This Useful Post:
Jaffa, sjgadsby

fpp | # 68 | 2009-06-12, 09:03 | Report

Re: l10n...

Well, I swear that I didn't do it on purpose, but here is a perfect example of what I ranted about earlier on the translation workflow...

I just upgraded to the new version, saw that it was automatically using my French translation, and the next second was horrified to see that I'd managed to commit a huge mistake on one word (not a typo, a misunderstanding)...

In a workflow such as I described, I would have checked my work on my local instance and seen the bug immediately before sending you the file. Or at the very least I could have corrected it afterwards and posted it here for others to use.

Now I have to wait until I get back home, send you the corrected .po file, then stare at that shameful poop until the next version comes out :-)

Of course it's not a problem as I'm probably the only French user at the moment, but it's still a good, if unintended, illustration of my argument...

The Following User Says Thank You to fpp For This Useful Post:
conny

conny | # 69 | 2009-06-12, 09:42 | Report

Originally Posted by fpp View Post

Re: l10n...

Well, I swear that I didn't do it on purpose, but here is a perfect example of what I ranted about earlier on the translation workflow...

I just upgraded to the new version, saw that it was automatically using my French translation, and the next second was horrified to see that I'd managed to commit a huge mistake on one word (not a typo, a misunderstanding)...

In a workflow such as I described, I would have checked my work on my local instance and seen the bug immediately before sending you the file. Or at the very least I could have corrected it afterwards and posted it here for others to use.

Now I have to wait until I get back home, send you the corrected .po file, then stare at that shameful poop until the next version comes out :-)

Of course it's not a problem as I'm probably the only French user at the moment, but it's still a good, if unintended, illustration of my argument...

Yea that's true. It's difficult to guess the context of a particular string if you're only having the .po file. Maybe I should really think about using an alternative to gettext. Or maybe the community translation tool will help. At least the plan is to have a tool, were you translate the strings directly inside the application UI. Sounds cool to me, but sounds also hard to realize. So I'm not sure that we will see that anytime soon...

munky261 | # 70 | 2009-06-13, 02:44 | Report

Is there any way, when you open conboy, to have it display the note selection screen rather than the last note that was up?