On the blink

Well, since I saw a post of sethb about translating and localizing Firefox, I’m trying to do some post about my experience with that case, but with exams, some work and more things, I will post this today

My experience (it’s a person inside of me) says me that it he/she/it hasn’t worked too much… I began with a existing Firefox 2 translation (I don’t remember if it was only a 2.0.0.x translation or a 2.+ translation (on the trunk)), but it was easy to continue. Ricardo Palomares (owner of the es-ES team, and admin of www.proyectonave.es, and translator of Sunbird, and Thunderbird…) helped me with my environment, and it was really really easy to continue his job.

I use Mozilla Translator. Why? It’s simple, easy and has a good UI to manage all things I need, and, of course, because last translator of Firefox es-ES used it.

We use some bash scripts to do the work: one for checking out en-US files (or update), another with my CVS account to check out es-ES files and another to open MT with appropriate settings.

Once it’s opened, press Ctrl+U and you will see new strings to be translated, or modified, or something… Finish the translation and… Export to CVS!! Check in your changes and… that’s it!! You will have a nice build in a few minutes

And that works.

I see people complain about MT and a little problems with that, but if you set a good enviroment and check all things, you will have a nice tool (mmmm, maybe a wiki page?? [wait, writing down on my hand], oook).

The thing is: if you work along the timeline, you will have a nice and near-0-errors final build in your own language. Obviously, you have to translate, but always localize, so, it might be difficult to find a search engine for your region, or a dictionary, or ebay in your language… And protocols-handler too!! (what a headache!!). We decided to keep the same newsfeed (20minutos.es), a free and Creative Commons diary daily, so less things to think about.

The next thing is fix some bad translated strings and check in in the “trunk”.

Next-next thing: mozilla-central!! (cvs, bazar, svn, hg!!!)

WE did it!!!

Amazing, around 8.3M downloads in 24hours. 83TB of data only in 24hours.

You have downloaded Firefox 3 yesterday? Go and get your certificate!

Amazing guys, amazing!!!

Add this code to your page:

<a href="http://www.mozilla-hispano.org/images/ff3-cuenta-atras.php"><img style="border: none" src="http://www.mozilla-hispano.org/images/ff3-cuenta-atras.png.php" alt="Firefox 3" /></a>

Mozilla-Hispano (Nukeador and StripTM) did it.

[Another sizes here]

17th June, 2008.

Note this date on your calendar. Firefox 3 will be shipped this day.

Waiting for that, you can download a RC (RC3 at this momment).

Anyway, you can spread the word and make a world record.

As we are getting closer to the final release of Firefox 3, all our appreciated addons are being updated to work on Firefox 3.

Now, the turn of Firebug.

Firebug 1.2 beta released. Big improvements on memory and stability.

Recommended.

If you need to develop an extension for a browser, you will definitelly develop for Mozilla products: easy, low-cost, and low-tech.

For IE, you need: Visual Studio 2005, and learn C++… and registry touches, and COM and…

For Firefox, open Notepad, save as .xul, edit an .rdf, know some JS, pack them as .xpi, install it, and:

Hello World!

IE, please, don’t hurt the web.

Wow, Ricardo did an incredible work yesterday. Lot of accesskeys were duplicated in the same window/menu/tab so we needed to change them before RC1 is released.

So, thank you Ricardo!. Around 15 mails of wrong accesskeys and translations:

Change 10288

Change 10249

Change 10247 (made by Ricardo)

Lot of stuff to get es-ES a good localization