[gui-dev] Re: [trans] Estonian Translation

From: "Justin Schmidt" <[email protected]>
> Given that the internationalization efforts are going so well, and LW 4.9 
> lockdown will be easing soon, I was hoping to start some brainstorming for 
> improving two potential issues with our current 'change language' 
> workflow:
>  (1)  There's a nasty scaling problem if there are too many languages in 
> the menu.
>
> I know Philippe was at least considering working on a solution to (1) 
> using a language chooser window.  This seems like it has a lot of 
> potential.

I already sent a patch for this, which uses submenus to group languages by 
script/character set type (as seen on the translate page). This patch was 
smart enough to:
- order these script by proximity (see the proposed order on the translate 
page itself),
- keep out of of a submenu the current group, so that the currently selected 
language will be shown there

The other options I considered was to also keep out of a group (and place 
them at the beginning of the menu), the default English language, and the 
default language of the running platform (because these two will likely be 
those that most users will choose, and because it will help users locate 
their prefered language).

>  (2)  If people accidentally choose a language they cannot understand, 
> frequently they don't know how to find their language again.


> A potential solution to (2) is to use a flag icon for the 'Change 
> Language' menu item (and also each of the translations in the sub-menu, if 
> necessary).  This additional visual hinting should allow someone scanning 
> through the top-level menus to find their language again.  Another option 
> is to do something with the status bar, perhaps only for non-English 
> users.

That's what I had proposed: adding a graphic button with some flags in the 
interface (for example near the animated LimeWire icon) that displays a 
popup when it is clicked.

I would prefer a popup dialog with confirmation buttons (OK/Cancel), rather 
that a popup menu or combo box, because it seems that people click on the 
menus by error while navigating there with their mouse (and this causes most 
of the calls for support, as they don't know how their LimeWire switched to 
another language).

The other reasons is that:
- a dialog is less limited in size, and it can have easy to use scrollbars,
- a dialog can be created using a reusable panel class which can be shared 
by the first-run installation wizard, or by the options dialog.

Philippe.

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