A tool for maintaining a localized Cocoa app.
- 2012 © Joe Hsieh
- joehsieh@kkbox.com
Apple has a great architecture for internationalization and localization, however, maintaining a localized iOS or Mac application is still a pain.
Apple has a tool, genstring, which helps you to extract strings need to be localized from your source code, and generate a string-pair map. The tool is nice if you are working on an application which is never localized.
In real world, what you are doing daily is maintaining an existing localization text file, and check if there is addition or deletion of the strings need to be localized if you ever change your source code. What genstring does is to generate a new file, but you do not want a new file, and to translate all of the strings in your project every time.
What you really want is a tool, which knows these changes.
That is what the Localizer app tries to solve.
Localizer is an editor for your "Localizable.strings" files, like any other document-based applications.
Just open your existing files, add new files or folders of your source code, then simply click on the "Scan" button on the toolbar. After scanning, new strings will be in blue, while the strings ever localized but deleted from source code will be in red.
Then, you can translate these strings from the table user interface, and save the file for furthur use. Localizer remembers where these strings are from, and the paths of your scan folders and files.
- Mac OS X 10.7
- Xcode
- Download Xcode. Xcode is available on Mac App Store and Apple Developer Connection.
- Open Localizer.xcodeproj with Xcode.
- Click on the "Run" button.
Enjoy it!