Sucess story

Firefox is closing up for RC1 and there's a lot of testing going on. I received a report that stated that on MacOS, the mac + Q combination didn't close the browser as expected.

So I immediately figured out this is about a command key, so I went off and looked in Narro 'Q' (the simple quotes do an exact search) in the original texts. Found it. It was translated as 'E'. Fixed it. Great, but I thought there might be more mistakes like this. So I looked up every context that has 'cmd' in it. Got 7 pages of command keys, access keys and texts. All I had to do is check each original text that has only one letter, remember I was looking for command keys. In the 7 pages I found about 20 command keys, checked them all. Now imagine how long would it take if I didn't have Narro.

With Narro it took 1 minute.

Project management

It's been two weeks. I had some work besides Narro, so the weeks went a little bit slower for Narro.

Still I got to do a lot of stuff:

• finally there's a project management page with export and import with nice progress bars
• there's a progress bar in the translation page too so you can see how you're going
• there are now three plugins: entity checker, punctuation checker and spell checker
• there's a new preference, where you can paste some characters that aren't on your keyboard; you'll see them when you translate and you can use your mouse to add them
• many thanks to Huda Sarfraz for his suggestions; I added some file icons to help you while browsing
• the comments from the dtd/ini/inc files are now visible together with the context (see an example)

I know I promised to lay low with the new features, but I just can't resist. But I'll leave the database structure alone until release and having that in mind, the current Narro installation for Mozilla projects will be stable, so have fun with it.

I'll run an import on Firefox CVS and Thunderbird CVS every night, so if you feel like giving it a try, just export the project in your language and compare it with what you got. Note that Narro will check if the access keys exist in the translated labels.

If you have comments, ideas or suggestions, don't be shy to share them.

I'm pushing hard for a first release in the begining of May. Until then I hope to add single file export/import, user management, user profile page with statistics and RSS notifications when new untranslated texts are imported.

Don't forget to poke the Narro installation to see what I'm talking about here. If you are experiencing long timings, it's because the server is pretty low powered and because that installation has over 40 languages in it, although Narro is meant to be installed for each localization team and you should have only the languages that you translate in or poke for ideas. Or just get a powerful server and put them all in.