Translate.org.za Development Blog

We managed to get the Afrikaans localisation for Firefox in with version 2.0.0.2. It is not an official download yet, we were only upgraded to “beta” status. Hopefully we will be an official release in the next version of Firefox. Please download this and test it. This release means that it should update automatically in future without breaking the translations. Download this version for Windows, Linux (i686), and Mac OS X (universal binary).

We’ve just submitted a bug to GNOME which adds character pickers for Afrikaans and a seperate one for Venda, Tswana and Northern Sotho.

What does this mean? Character Picker is a GNOME applet, its sits on the GNOME taskbar and displays a small list of buttons.  Useful if your keyboard doesn’t have those characters and you’re not sure how to type them.  In South Africa there are a number of people who need to type a few characters who find the keyboard difficult to understand or don’t want to mess with their keyboard.

Of course we have a keyboard!  But this is just a nice to have little extra. We certainly will find it useful as although we have keyboards setup sometime we simply need the list of characters easily accesible.

Just got an email from Matthias Klose, developer for Ubuntu and packager of the Ubuntu OpenOffice.org packages.  He’s looking at our spellcheckers for inclusion in Ubuntu.  We’re solving a few build problems with him but hopefully soon we’ll see all our checkers on a Linux computer near you.  Thanks Matthias.