ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[David Planella <david.planella@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

Continuing with the topic of internationalization, the next highly visible
UI element is app metadata. On the phone, you'll see this displayed in
different places:

- Click scope: on the list of apps
- Click scopes: on a single app dash page
- Launcher: when long-pressing a Launcher icon

Traditionally, this data has come from .desktop files on the desktop, but
with click packages and the Software Store some things are changing.

The situation right now is that translations come from the Store, where
there is support for editing them via a form. It should also be soon
possible for clients (e.g. the click scope) to fetch those translations
when online.

However, this leaves open the offline case: if translations for the
preinstalled apps are only available when online, the first user experience
before getting connected will be a mixture of English and native language
context, which is not very optimal.

I've had a talk with dobey as developer of the click scope, and we've
clarified some points, but we'd welcome some more input from experts in the
other parts of the platform i18n support touches:

1) Where: options to implement offline translations include adding
internationalization support to either .desktop or click manifest files,
and from a talk with dobey, it seems the manifest files would be a good
candidate. When online, translations could be downloaded and refreshed if
necessary.

2) Mapping: there are several different places where app metadata is
defined, and we'd need to make sure they are aligned. I've created a table
with those places and their mappings as of today. For the sake of
completion I've also included scopes metadata, as they are going to be
shipped as click packages in the future too:

    https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/AppMetadataTranslations

Please click, scopes and store folks let me know if these are correct.

3) Inline translations or MO files: for performance reasons, the suggestion
is to include the translations inline in in the manifest or desktop files,
as they could be read while listing all available apps without having to
additionally open each app's .mo file. Thoughts on this?

Any feedback on this will be really appreciated, as having excellent native
language support will be key for Ubuntu phones to be everywhere :)

Cheers,
David.

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/software-center-agent/+bug/1302045