• Another post about Localizing Firefox 3

    June 26th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with 3 comments »

    Spanish localizer, Guillermo López (IRC nick: willyaranda), pinged me this morning on IRC, pointing me to a post he wrote about his experience localizing Firefox 3.

    willyaranda is the browser module owner for es-ES and, along with other members of the Spanish team like Ricardo Palomares, is responsible for that localization.  Great work and thank you!

    Also interesting about this write-up, willyaranda describes his experience using the l10n tool, Mozilla Translator.

    Here is his story.

  • Some thoughts on Mozilla l10n

    June 25th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with 3 comments »

    In the past couple days, the Mozilla’s dev-l10n mailing list has seen a thread of conversation asking about how Mozilla chooses languages that are shipped and what can be done to improve the process.  I thought I’d write a bit on the incredibly hard work that goes into localizing and what might constitute plan for Mozilla post Firefox 3.

    Mozilla relies on the volunteer contributions from a very dedicated community of localizers who work so hard to meet Mozilla’s standards of perfection.  Contributors who choose to localize work with us to meet that standard and we do the best we can to meet their needs inside the pressures of release cycles.  In fact, I wrote a post about the process several months back and illustrated it with some slides.

    The Mozilla process is not perfect, but we hold high standards for user experience and expectations for Mozilla Firefox.  We choose to ship our official, non language-pack locales only when they are ready as a bug-free experience for the end-user. Because of this, the process is very elaborate, detail-oriented, and complex.  (see my linked to post above…)

    With the help from those volunteers, we released Firefox 3 in a coordinated effort that included simultaneously shipping official versions of the browser in 46 locales.  Two more are in beta status.  And, 20+ language packs that can be installed in the browser as addons. That is incredible work from around 70 different translation teams.  In fact, over 100 such highly-motivated teams have stepped forward to work at this on Mozilla projects over the last 10 years.

    Internet Explorer 7 simultaneously shipped its major release in one locale…English.

    Now that Firefox 3 has shipped, Mozilla’s l10n team and its community can focus both on getting new, official translations into the build and release process and on improving the existing process.

    One way to think of the release process is like a train leaving a station.  We do our best to try to get everyone to catch the next release train.  Another release train (Firefox 3.0.1) will be leaving the station soon and we will be trying to get more localization aboard.  Volunteers working on localizations come from all over the world.  Brazil, France, Germany, India, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, the list goes on and on.  (If I didn’t mention your country, I meant no offense.  You can see all the teams here.)  Those contributors are working hard right now to translate our software in their native languages to make sure they are ready for the the next release.

    As we grow as a global project (presently with over 180 million users), we continue to meet so many new contributors.  You might imagine that at times we are overwhelmed with the level of interest from our developer, testing, localizer, and user communities.  What a wonderfully complex challenge that contributors help make work in order to ship in 48 languages.

    As the dust settles from shipping Firefox 3, we are eager to increase the number of localizations we ship and improve our process.  It’ll take a strategic plan to make gains in our process and here is a piece of the plan I’d like to see take place:

    1. Globally, we reach out to individual localization teams and set up IRC or even telephone meetings,
    2. Figure out what is feasible to happen in the next 3-6 months for each translation team,
    3. Discuss plans for teams close to finishing translation on Firefox 2.0, Firefox 3.0.x, or Firefox 3.1,
    4. Address other agenda items for each team.

    What do you think of this plan?  Good idea or bad idea?  Did I miss anything?  If you have agenda points, let me know.  If we set up these team meetings, we can add those points to our list.

    Our goal is to get as many localizations that are close to finishing their translation, shipping when/if they can.

  • My script from today’s SUMO screencast

    June 20th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with no comments »

    Here’s a summary of the script I created for Support Day live screencast.  Thought I would pass it along to see how I prepared for it and then give everyone the notes for some cool tips in Firefox 3.

    —————————

    We started by taking people through how to create another profile in Firefox, in case you have multiple users or want to test something or just want to have multiple profiles for something like home and work use.  Here is a nice SUMO article that shows how to do this.

    Profile management out of the way, I guided people through some keyboard shortcuts that I think power users either use all the time or could start using if they don’t already.  In this post, these are PC specific.

    • ctrl + K — takes a user directly to the search box in the upper right corner of the browser
    • ctrl + L — takes a user to the URL bar
    • alt + enter — opens the forthcoming results from the URL bar (or the search box) into a new background tab
    • ctrl + T — new tab
    • ctrl + shift + T –  “uncloses” a tab
    • ctrl + tab (shift) — takes user through tabs in the right direction; holding shift and ctrl + tab takes user left through all tabs
    • ctrl + 1 (or 2, 3, 4…) — takes user to first tab (or second, third, fourth…)
    • ctrl click — opens new background tab
    • ctrl shift click –  opens new foreground tab

    Here is a great SUMO article about keyboard shortcuts.

    A section I thought all power users should know well is the “Options” menu (or “Preferences” for Mac users).  You can get there by clicking on Tools –> Options. (Firefox –> Preferences for Mac)

    We looked at setting up multiple start pages in the “Main” section of the UI (just add a | after the URL shown in the Main section and type in your next URL.  At startup, you’ll have two pages load in tabs.

    And then Content –> Enable Javascript –> advance…  One example I gave was that every now and again I visit a site that automatically resizes my broswer when that site gets focus.  That’s annoying! Ever have that happen to you?  Well, go into the advanced settings above and uncheck “move or resize existing windows”.

    about:config

    Most of the presentation was spent discussing how to tweak various things in “about:config” in the browser.  One big caveat that Asa and I really tried to hammer home:  DON’T PLAY WITH ABOUT:CONFIG UNLESS YOU REALLY KNOW WHAT YOU’RE CHANGING.  There are lots of tips on the Web that tell you to go into About:Config and do this or that and then Firefox will make you your morning coffee.  Watch out for this snake oil.

    For some background on about:config, you can check out this Mozilllazine article: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_:_FAQs_:_About:config_Entries

    At first, I just showed people how to get to about:config and then how to look through stuff and sort by different categories so a user can find what he or she wants.  We gave a quick preview on how to edit stuff and discussed the different between the default preferences and the bolded “user set” prefs.

    I then took the audience through a few features to tweak the Awesome bar so it does different things.  Many power users like the “old” URL bar of FF2 and before.  I pointed everyone to the “Oldbar” extension that presents the URL bar in the more traditional way.   Here is that oldbar add-on.

    Awesome bar power users can also change the number of results that appear when a user starts to key in familiar sites.  Here’s how you do that:

    • Enter about:config
    • Press the “I”ll be carefull. I promise!” button. (Because you will be.)
    • Enter browser.urlbar.maxRichResults in the Filter field to reach this preference.
    • Set it to your desired number of suggestions.

    Staying close to about:config, I then showed how to enable better color management, if you’re really into color images on the web…this is the trick for you.  (Forewarning, it may impact performance, so if that is a concern, then don’t enable this)

    • Enter gfx.color_management.enabled into the Filter field in about:config
    • set the boolean to true
    • if a user wants to explicity override the profile that the OS gives to Firefox, then you’ll have to enter “gfx.color_management.dipslay_profile” into the filter field and type that profile in the string
    • This extension also does all this for you…

    Finally, I tried to wrap up with some random tricks for users:

    And then, of course…the cool Easter Egg, about:robots.  Type about:robots into your URL and see what happens!

    Hope you enjoyed the demo.  Ping me with questions or suggestions.

    And, THANKS A MILLION TO Asa, Cww (irc nick), zxcc (irc), and Lucy for helping me with this. Couldn’t have done it without you.

  • Tips and Tricks for Power Users

    June 20th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with no comments »

    In about 15 minutes (1:15 PM Pacific Time UTC- 7), Asa and I will be hosting a live session on Firefox 3 tips and tricks for power users.

    It is all part of the Support Day, that has been going on all day.

    You can tune into the broadcast here:  http://www.mogulus.com/sfd

    Tune in…let me know how I do.  We’re hoping that it will be somewhat casual and like a variety radio show…but Asa and I have been gathering a bunch of cool tips all morning to show you

  • Translate.org.za bug day

    June 19th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with 1 comment »

    Passing this along to Planet for anyone who wants to participate in a bug day with Translate.org.za.

    Hallo everybody:

    The Translate project will be having a bug day on Friday 20 June. We want to invite people to join us in testing, fixing, documenting, and enjoying our tools and discussing some ideas. Many of you might now want to focus your attention on Thunderbird 3, your favourite plugins, or whatever else.  You are all welcome.

    How does it work

    For most of the day interested people will gather in #pootle on irc.freenode.net and try to tackle a bug, improve some piece of documentation or just be helpful to anybody else trying to do something with Pootle or the Translate Toolkit.

    Many of us are in timezones similar to European timezones, so that might determine when most activity can be expected – but feel free to pop in at any time.

    For more information about our project, please check the website with information for users and developers:

    http://translate.sourceforge.net/

    Specifically, bugs are reported here:

    http://bugs.locamotion.org/

« Older Entries