Localization

Lightning / Localization / QA / Sunbird — 2 Comments
01
Aug 08

Simon’s developer notes: Back from Mozilla summit

So I’m back from the Mozilla summit and hope to get out of my jet lag within the next few days. It was really a great adventure with bears, a power outage and a rockslide which got me first floatplane flight ever.

While many people seem to believe that Microsoft is behind all of this, I believe that this was all carefully planned out by Dan Portillo and John Lilly of MoCo :) My hat goes off to dan, who did a perfect job of organizing this whole event for over 400 people.

The summit was great in every aspect. I met lots of people, who I had only known online for years like Gary from the Rumbling Edge, Robert Kaiser (KaiRo) of SeaMonkey fame, Wayne Mery (Thunderbird QA), Axel Hecht (Pike), Mitchell Baker, the hopefully soon to be appointed MoFo Executive Director Mark Surman and many more who I can’t possibly all name, because then this post would get a few pages longer.

The sessions were great (I went to most of the Calendar/Thunderbird related ones) and I even got to hold one session myself, where I could introduce myself to a lot of localizers in my new role as Thunderbird localization coordinator.

Besides the sessions, I also got the chance to talk with some people more in depth about some issues, most notably with Mitchell Baker, David Boswell and Mark Surman about sorting out the issues of getting the Calendar Project into the Mozilla Foundation directed giving program, the Mozilla Foundation vision and more ways of cooperating with the Mozilla Foundation and leveraging its assets to move the Calendar Project forward. We also did some product planning regarding the necessary steps for enabling Lightning in Thunderbird.

There’s much more, that I could talk about, but I will just close this post by saying that this was a really great event, that many people will likely be talking about for years to come. Thanks Mozilla for organizing this!

Lightning / Localization / QA / Sunbird — 27 Comments
03
Jul 08

Simon’s Developer notes: On the importance of communication

Yesterday we had a pretty interesting developer conference call, which was basically about the issue that only a very small team is currently developing on Lightning and Sunbird (basically just three people), that it is hard to reach community expectations with regards to bugfixes and feature work with so small a team and what would be necessary to attract more outside developers.

From my point of view one of our shortcomings in the past has been on the communication front. With that I don’t mean the communication between different people on certain bug characteristics or code issues (that works great), but the communication between the calendar project and our community.

Currently our channels of communication are:

  • This blog, which just gets a post every one to two weeks with a bug fix status update
  • our developer and support newsgroups (mozilla.dev.apps.calendar and mozilla.support.calendar), which are not exactly buzzing with activity
  • IRC, which not many people are watching

The result – at least as far as I see it – is that

  • the core people from the project come across as a closed circle to which it is hard to get in to (the opposite is true)
  • what’s going on in the project is not exactly transparent. Instead I would call it opaque.

So what can we do to improve our situation, to make the project more transparent, to raise the interest in the project and by that to gain more outside contributors? A few things come to my mind:

  • We need to talk more about what we are doing. Therefore every core contributor will try to commit himself to at least blog about various stuff at least once a week from now. These posts will probably range from developer-oriented topics (interesting or disgusting pieces of code, recent bugfixes, UI considerations, QA problems/successes/challenges) and project-related topics (PR issues, community relations, …) to basically anything that the people find worthwhile to blog about.

    In my opinion a great example to follow here is the Firefox community. Where nearly everybody involved in the project (developers, build engineers, QA staff, PR and marketing people, management) tries to blog regularly about various Firefox stuff or other stuff that interests them. The outside image that this creates is the image of a beehive, where everybody is doing lots of stuff to improve Firefox and in my opinion stuff like this also attracts outside people, because everybody would like to contribute to a project that is alive and well instead of a project that is stalling or dead.

  • We need to raise the awareness of the project in the outside world. I’ll try to contact a few people to get some press contacts, in the hope to do some interviews with some people interested in open source. We hope that this will raise the awareness of Lightning and Sunbird and bring in outside contributors.

So these are my ideas. I would be interested in getting feedback and suggestions from you. Do you have more ideas to attract new talent for the calendar project? Is my analysis correct or do you see other areas that we could improve on? I would love to hear from you on that…

Localization — 2 Comments
27
Jun 08

Lightning/Sunbird 0.9 string freeze announcement

I want to make those of you, who are actively translating the calendar products (Lightning and Sunbird) aware, that our string freeze for our next release 0.9 is approaching. According to our release schedule we are aiming for a string freeze on July 14 2008, which is two and a half
weeks away from now.
After the string freeze we are currently planning for two additional weeks before we try to release our first release candidate on July 28. We would really appreciate it if you could have your locales already in shape for the first RC as this will broaden both the localization and application testing base.
That gives you about a month to get your localizations in shape if you start now or two weeks, if you decide to wait for the string freeze. From my point of view, it certainly makes sense to start working now, at least in a few areas. If you take a look at all the string changes since our 0.8 release and now, you’ll notice that we’ve done a lot of cleanup work by removing unused and obsolete entities. This is definitely something that you can start working on now, while doing the remaining update work after the string freeze.
The 0.9 release will again come from the MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH, but since we’re keeping both the 1.8 branch and the cvs trunk in total sync, it makes sense for you to commit your changes to both at the same time.
I’ll post some status updates in the coming weeks. If any of you will not be able to keep his locale updated for the 0.9 release, please let me know beforehand. As of now we are planning with all localizations that were included in the 0.8 release as well as with the new locales added since then (Norwegian (Nynorsk), Romanian and Traditional Chinese).
Please let me know if any of you wants to join us for 0.9.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask them in the corresponding discussion thread on the newsgroup mozilla.dev.l10n.

Localization — 1 Comment
20
Jan 08

String freeze for Sunbird/Lightning 0.8 approaching

The Calendar team will freeze all Calendar-related strings tomorrow night (2008-01-21) at 20:00 PST (2008-01-22 05:00 CET).

Localizers are encouraged to start working on their translation of the upcoming Lightning/Sunbird 0.8 release after the string freeze is in effect. Localizers should try to finish a first draft of their translation by February 7th, 2008 (you can still check in corrections afterwards).

We are currently planning to release our first release candidate of Lightning and Sunbird one day after this date (2008-02-08) and it would be good if localized builds of all languages would be available by then, to enable the different l10n communities to test the localization quality.

Please direct all questions to the mozilla.dev.l10n newsgroup, which you can also follow via Google Groups.

Lightning / Localization / Sunbird — 2 Comments
23
Dec 07

String freeze postponed for 0.8 release

Just a short info, that the Calendar developers have decided to move the string freeze for the upcoming 0.8 release (currently scheduled for February 2008) one week forward.

The string freeze will now be in effect on January 14th, 2008.

We made this decision, because we need some additional time to finish some of our UI work, because pretty much everyone from the developers is away over the christmas holidays.

If you have any questions, please post them to the mozilla localizer newsgroup.

I wish everyone of our localizers a merry christmas and a happy new year. Thank you for your continuing support!

Lightning / Localization / Sunbird — 4 Comments
10
Oct 07

Notes from the talk with Ascher and Code freeze announcement

Notes from the discussion with David Ascher and the team are on the wiki. I take notes in mediawiki formating and it’s just easier to post them that way.

One thing Simon forgot to mention is that we will be code-freezing for 0.7 RC2 this Friday at 23:59:59 UTC. So if you are the owner of any of the following localization bugs, please get them fixed, or let us know if there is something blocking you.

  • Basque: Unlocalized default category names (Bug 399291)
  • Macedonian: Unlocalized default category names (Bug 399290)
  • Turkish: Missing default preferences (Bug 398046)

Please help us out on Tuesday, October 16, for smoke testing of the final 0.7 release. You can find us in #calendar and #calendar-qa on IRC.
Thanks!

Lightning / Localization / Sunbird — 1 Comment
10
Oct 07

Lightning/Sunbird 0.7 localization status

I want to give you a short update on the state of localization for the upcoming Lightning/Sunbird 0.7 release. The RC1 was released last week on October 4th. Since we haven’t noticed any additional serious issues, a RC2 will come within the next few days.

While most localizations look fine from a quick glance, some still have minor issues, which need to be resolved within the next 2-3 days. The affected localizations are:

  • Basque (eu): Unlocalized default category names (Bug 399290)
  • Hungarian (hu): Missing default preferences (Bug 399241)
  • Macedonian (mk): Unlocalized default category names (Bug 399291)
  • Punjabi (pa-IN): 50% of user interface strings are displayed in English (Bug 398067)
  • Turkish (tr): Missing default preferences (Bug 398046)

As we have seen no reaction from the Mongolian (mn) localizer, there will be no localized Mongolian builds for 0.7.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me or post a comment here in the blog.

Lightning / Localization / Sunbird — 11 Comments
27
Sep 07

[Release Update] Lightning & Sunbird 0.7 release branch

I want to inform you that the release branch has been created, from which Lightning and Sunbird 0.7 will be released. The name of this branch is SUNBIRD_0_7_BRANCH.

Please note that code checkins on this branch are restricted. You
will need the approval from our lead developer, Daniel Boelzle, before you commit changes
to that branch. Localizers do not need approval for checkins on this branch.

Developers and localizers should however make sure, that all changes are committed to the trunk, the MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH and the SUNBIRD_0_7_BRANCH in parallel. This is to avoid inconsistencies as we do parallel development on the trunk and the branches.

Lightning / Localization / Sunbird — 11 Comments
26
Sep 07

Lightning/Sunbird Status Update (September 26)

Thanks for bearing with us as we missed the initially proposed release date for our first release candidate (RC1), which was originally scheduled to be mid-september. This will hopefully be the last status update before the RC1.

The current plan (as of yesterday evening) is to create a release branch today, create the RC1 release builds, do a short smoketest and release those builds as the official 0.7 RC1 within this week.

As you can see from the list below, we have taken some fixes pretty late in the game to give you a better and more stable user experience once 0.7 is released. Our localizers have also been pretty busy and we are proud to report that we’ll have 24 non-English languages for the RC1 (3 more than for 0.5) and hopefully 1 or 2 more (Argentinian Spanish and Mongolian) for the final release.

Here’s the list of fixed bugs since the last status update:

  • Bug 356056:
    Snooze dialog needs to be more flexible
  • Bug 359443:
    Deleting item from Agenda deletes an email instead
  • Bug 370148:
    API enhancement: Providing free-busy information
  • Bug 379894:
    ‘Show completed tasks’ checkbox has no effect on CalDav calendar
  • Bug 386480:
    View mode is not remembered after Thunderbird restart
  • Bug 388414:
    [Today Pane] Implement ‘MiniDay’ Pane
  • Bug 390147:
    Export calendar is not wired up correctly
  • Bug 390842:
    Error: redeclaration of var Cc in console, kills Lightning
  • Bug 393388:
    Go back to calendar view via mode toolbar -> ‘Day starts at’ is not recognized, view start at 0:00
  • Bug 395781:
    Event Dialog: Hyperlinks don’t provide visual feedback (focus rectangle) if selected with tab key
  • Bug 395883:
    Readonly dialog says ‘Repeat: Occurs ???’ for yearly and monthly recurring items
  • Bug 396223:
    Only set calendar preferences if they have changed
  • Bug 396297:
    Event/Task description is not saved when exiting by closing the new edit window
  • Bug 396667:
    Task dialog: clicking the timezone link doesn’t bring up the timezone picker
  • Bug 396865:
    workaround alarm without DUE
  • Bug 396873:
    Event dialog is messed up if being subscribed to old Sunbird calendar
  • Bug 396877:
    Agenda update fails after deleting a task from tasklist
  • Bug 396888:
    Event dialog: Timezone links are not displayed correctly for all-day events
  • Bug 396931:
    Toolbar buttons for switching calendar views shift when depressed
  • Bug 396949:
    Strict warnings in agenda-tree.js, messenger-overlay-sidebar, messenger-overly-toolbar
  • Bug 397029:
    Add msimg32 to Makefile.in
  • Bug 397255:
    Various windows: Labels are not properly associated with the controls they’re labelling
  • Bug 397359:
    Today pane may be raised in calendar mode
  • Bug 397542:
    Enable es-AR (Espanol Argentina) localization

Thanks again to all our developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters. Keep up the good work!

Lightning / Localization / Sunbird — 18 Comments
18
Sep 07

Lightning/Sunbird Status Update (September 18)

Another status update as we’re coming ever closer to the first release candidate (RC1) of the upcoming 0.7 release. The most notable fix is probably the fix to bug 393387 which will hopefully take care of all the disappearing events issues, that some users have experienced in the 0.5 release.

The RC1 will also be the first chance for localizers to get their hands on a fully localized build of Lightning, so that the localization quality can be estimated (and maybe improved) for the final 0.7 release. To achieve this we have worked hard behind the scenes with many localizers and as of today 20 localizations other than English are ready for the RC1 (Catalan, Czech, Danish, German, Spanish, Basque, French, Gaelic, Georgian, Italian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese (Europe), Russian, Slovak, Swedish and (for the first time) Chinese).

Were still missing localized strings from the Hungarian, Mongolian, Portuguese (Brazil), Punjabi and Slovenian localizers, but hopefully we’ll be able to get localized builds for these languages as well, so that all users of the 0.5 release can update to 0.7 once it comes out.

Here’s the list of fixed bugs since the last status update:

  • Bug 351084:
    Can’t set alarm for new task, existing or default alarm throws error (add-on patch)
  • Bug 356569:
    wcap subscription auto registration by explicit pref only for now
  • Bug 357079:
    Agenda tab doesn’t update today’s date after hibernating
  • Bug 359443:
    Deleting item from Agenda deletes an email instead
  • Bug 367159:
    [Mac] Date picker disappears after it is clicked on, before user selects a date, POOR MANs FIX
  • Bug 377403:
    Event dialog: iTIP invitations not sent
  • Bug 374235:
    Breakpad should replace Talkback in future versions of Sunbird
  • Bug 386479:
    Switch to Calendar mode don’t work properly using buttons, Calendar menu or keyboard shortcut
  • Bug 386636:
    mail-mode should be visible after clicking the tray-icon of an incoming mail (addon-patch)
  • Bug 388418:
    Can’t create ‘Last day of the month’ recurrence rule
  • Bug 388985:
    Calendar color not applied in views: events are translucent
  • Bug 393366:
    Calendar List check boxes are not XP/Vista platform conform
  • Bug 393387:
    week view is blank
  • Bug 393412:
    calPeriod code improvements
  • Bug 394149:
    Event dialog: Status field (tentative, confirmed, canceled) is missing
  • Bug 395288:
    Event dialog: Wrong reminder entry shown for odd durations
  • Bug 395658:
    Colliding event boxes in rotated view
  • Bug 395777:
    changing default for non-owned calendar to readOnly
  • Bug 396093:
    Menu View -> Task List is broken, Task List is always visible
  • Bug 396206:
    Make it easier to overlay the calendar properties dialog
  • Bug 396269:
    Add zh-CN (Simplified Chinese) to shipped-locales
  • Bug 396277:
    fixing view update after timezone, tasks in view change
  • Bug 396580:
    Fix guessSystemTimezone if no TZNAME is set

Thanks again to all our developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters. Keep up the good work!

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