Well I just got back from EuroPython 2007 held in Vilnius, Lithuania.
EuroPython was definitely smaller than our American Pycon counterpart and the diversity
of talks more limited.
My favorite talk was on Streaming with Python, Twisted, and GStreamer.
I particularly enjoyed meeting developers on that side of the hemisphere
who don’t normal make it to the American conferences. Overall, EuroPython
had a very intimate feel.
On July 10th, I gave a lightening talk on Chandler which went very well.
I was trying to figure out how to capture all the functionality of Chandler in 5 minutes
or less of speech time. I decided to run our Functional Test Framework while
describing the different features Chandler has as the suite was creating new
collections, new items, stamping, configuring accounts, sending email, publishing
collections, and subscribing to collections. All in all I was able to show a large
amount of Chandler functionality this way in under 3 minutes.
I then quit the tests and switch to a running version of Chandler
spending the last two minutes demonstrating how internationalization and the plug-in
framework work in Chandler. Specifically, I did an Amazon search for
Scott Rosenberg and showed the collection results as well as an EVDB search
for Opera in San Francisco.
I got a very good reception from the audience. As many people had not
been following Chandler in a while they were surprised at how
much recent progress had been made.
On July 11th, I gave my Internationalizing in Python: Chandler a case study presentation.
It went very well also. There was strong turn out and I think may people were
surprised out how hard it is to actually Internationalize / localize an application in Python.
In addition to showing slides I gave code examples of EggTranslations,
PyICU, and how to create localization eggs using the Chandler tools.
You can view photos from the conference as well as access my presentation slides at:
http://people.osafoundation.org/bkirsch/europython/
On July 12th and 13th I hosted two days of Sprints on localizing Chandler.
I must say I learned a great deal. One thing that I had not considered is
that localizers also make a very good focus group on Chandler usability. Since none of
the translators had worked in depth with Chandler before, it was not only an exercise in how
easy is the application to localize but also how easy is it for someone to start Chandler and
grasp the concepts the application offers.
There were many issued raised at the Sprint including bugs in the Chandler code that are hindering a
complete localization, better tools that need to be provided for localization, and ways that we need to
better organize our strings in code to create a usable Chandler.pot for translators to work with.
I would classify those two days as providing the last few missing pieces regarding Chandler’s localization
strategy.
I am excited to get started on providing the user community with the ability to localize Chandler in
our 0.7.1 release which will follow Preview.
I have summarized the entire experience of the Sprints and next steps for Chandler i18n / l10n
as well as included a link to the Swedish translation egg created during the Sprints here:
http://people.osafoundation.org/bkirsch/postsprint/
-Brian Kirsch
