Koala
Many of you may remember our localization intern, Adrian Kalla, from last year. A dedicated community member before his internship, Adrian returned to school to continue his contribution to Mozilla. Recently, he approached us with a request to support a project that would help complete his course of studies. After expanding the idea with Axel, he had a project idea to pursue and the l10n-drivers jumped at supporting such an interesting experiment that Adrian calls “Koala”.
He will be blogging about his project on a regular basis, but he asked me to post the following initially to describe the idea:
During my internship at Mozilla last year, I developed a Silme-based “compare-locales” version. It is a command-line only tool, that requires from the user to have experience in working with a console. Well – we all know that a text-interface is not necessarily a user’s first-choice, so Axel came up with a great idea to develop a user-friendly graphical front-end for it.
Being back at my University, one part of my major is to work on a project, which may be done in cooperation with external companies. This project is officially scheduled for the term directly after the internship – that is, the chance to move Axel’s idea from the ‘ideabox’ to the ‘real’ world. I see it as a great opportunity to continue my work on Mozilla L10n tools and my major at the same time. Everything went quickly: Axel defined the project and its details, which was then accepted by my professor as an official university project. Together with my fellow computer science students, namely Adam Kowalewski and Florian Schloegl, we created a project team. And…
What exactly are we working on?
Calling the project just a “graphical interface for compare-locales” would underestimate the objectives we have set for it. It will be an extension for the Komodo Edit & Komodo IDE developer-editor/IDE applications, which are based on Mozilla technologies, that will help with the daily work of holding Mozilla localizations up-to-date. Starting with pulling Mercurial repositories, comparing the changes, showing that changes to the user directly in the work files, …, ending with helping during the translation process (e.g. translation-suggestions, syntax highlighting) and committing the changes back to a repository – everything in just one tool.
We named the extension “Koala”, which stands for “Komodo Advanced Localization Addon”.
More information will be available soon on http://koala.mozdev.org .
To accomplish the project, we have a September, 15 (2009 of course 
) deadline. But you will hear of us sooner. Stay tuned.
