Changes

• Fixed Problem with Filter Scope
• Addressed an Issue that might prevent some users from closing the Preferences Windows

The second problem was reported by two users but so far we have been unable to reproduce it. If you are a developer and too find that you cannot close the preferences window we need your help! Please e-mail us so that we can arrange for inspecting the problem on your machine.

Update March 28: Approved after 10 days.

Changes

• FIXED: blank path to ibtool considered valid
• FIXED: broken display of relative paths
• FIXED: weird handling of tab and return while editing
• FIXED: Endless Loop with File Change Notifications
• FiXED: Scan Sources did not add a token that was just removed
• FIXED: Superfluous file modification message on saving
• FIXED: Ordering by key should ignore case

Also we had to add a beautiful Retina icon for Retina MacBook Pro to be able to submit the update. It’s in Apple’s hands now and we will update this post as soon as it is through review.

We have to keep our fingers crossed because due to the way Linguan uses the xcodeproj it cannot be (easily) sandboxed. Though Apple had stated that they will accept minor fixes (like the ones mentioned above) for updates. We sincerely hope that they will honor this.

Update Oct 6th: Apple approved the update after 24 days. You can get it on the app store.

Changes

• FIXED: Problem with invalid UTF8 characters coming out of ibtool
• FIXED: Broken Compatibility with OS X 10.6
• FIXED: Changes to the Toolbar did not get saved
• FIXED: Checkbox missing to enable/disable XIB support

The update has been submitted to Apple and will be auto-released once it passes inspection.

When reporting issues with Linguan please always create a small sample Xcode project with the bare bones contents to be able to reproduce the problem. This enables us to fix it all the more quickly.

Update July 6th: Update is now available on the app store.

For the immediate first version we are remote-controlling ibtool which needs to be installed with the Xcode Commanline Tools and the path properly set up.

sudo /usr/bin/xcode-select /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer

… or wherever your Xcode.app is installed.

This one was a mixture between procrastination on my part and rushing to submit it. The former because as a developer I am not so happy with the external dependency on ibtool. The latter because any major updates to Linguan probably have to be sandboxed after June 1st. This will – in all likelihood – necessitate that users can no longer conveniently open the xcodeproj, but instead will have to open the project folder and Linguan will have to hold onto the authorization for it. Also it will probably no longer be possible to execute an external shell script or tool from within the Sandbox.

Time will tell (and also Apple) how we will move forward, but I still plan to write an Open Source replacement for ibtool which we can add via static library and thus remove the external dependency.

When you select a XIB file in the project navigator you will notice that the comment and the name columns are grayed out. That is necessary because you cannot modify the object ids or else ibtool will not find the element that a certain string belongs to. Elements in XIB files are keyed by their object id and this has to be the same between two languages for the process to work.

If you find that the object identifiers have gone out of sync between to language versions of a XIB file then it is best to copy one over the other and localize it from scratch.

Also we ask that you are patient when loading large projects with many XIB files as ibtool is only single-threaded and awfully slow. But for the immediate short term this gives users a fully integrated way to localize their interface builder files.

Changes

• ADDED: Support for localizing XIB files

The update was sent to Apple and I will manually release it once it is approved because this will go in parallel with an increase in price. So if you want to purchase it at the current low price then please do so right now.

A week ago I received a preview for the next version of Linguan which will also allow you to localize XIB files. Initially this will be facilitated by the ibtool tool which is contained in Xcode.app as well as gets installed in /usr/bin if you setup the command line tools.

The guys at BytePoets – who we partnered with to make Linguan a reality – integrated it such that you can edit strings and XIB files with virtually no difference. Behind the scenes you have ibtool humming away extracting the tokens from the interface builder files and if you make a modification to write them back in.

There are a few minor adjustments still necessary. For one there needs to be a preference setting to specify the path to ibtool. Without it the XIB functionality has to be disabled. Then we need to disable editing of the name column for tokens coming from a XIB because that’s the key that ibtool needs to send the updated string to the right place. If users can edit that it would probably cause trouble.

I am hoping to have a similar approach as we did in the past with genstrings. You might remember that initially Linguan was calling the original genstrings, but I reverse-engineered a static library with the same functionality which is orders of magnitude faster. Once this was working properly we replaced the external function to an internal one.

As soon as I have some time I hope to getting started with ibtool2 in a similar fashion. Write a GCD-multithreaded super-charged open-source version of ibtool that we can put in a static library and thus eliminate this external dependency.

Oh, if you have not done so yet I strongly urge you to purchase Linguan now because we will definitely raise the price tag once XIB support is live. Also your purchase gives us the budget to add more exciting features in the future.

Linguan un-escapes all texts it reads from strings files so that they can be displayed correctly. You don’t want to have to deal with backslashes in the editor. Now on writing I had thought it to be a good idea to also escape everything, including question marks, backslashes and single quotes. It was a bad idea to do that because this unduely changes the tokens and translations.

Translators (the sad kind without Linguan) would be confused by having to deal with lots of \’ in the text. And there where some reports of the localized string loading functions not being able to find the key. Not always, but this is clearly not what we wanted.

This update relaxes the escaping on writing to the extent that only double quotes and invisible characters are now being escaped.

Changes

• ADDED: Option to decoding of \\U unicode sequences on loading files
• ADDED: Copy/Paste now possibly without the need to double-click on cell
• FIXED: Problem with xcodeproject with non-English CFBundleDevelopmentRegion
• FIXED: Warnings not being updated if tab is visible before validating
• FIXED: Over-Escaping of single quotes on scanning
• FIXED: Parse File duplicates loaded tokens

Changes

• FIXED: missing strings file no longer aborts import
• FIXED: added – Button for deleting tokens
• FIXED: deletion of wrong row
• FIXED: over-escaping of \ on writing strings files
• FIXED: wrong token name updated on enter key
• FIXED: search filter not reset on adding a new token
• FIXED: Previous/Next buttons in wizard cease to function
• NEW: replaced genstrings with high-speed custom implementation (>20x speed improvement)
• NEW: support custom localization macro prefix

This new version does no longer support 32-bit because the new strings scanner was implemented using ARC. We hope that this does not inconvenience any of our existing uses. But then again, serious developers are on a 64 bit machine anyway since Snow Leopard…

The new version has been submitted to Apple today.

Changes

• Fixed: Translations will no longer get trimmed
• Fixed: Problem opening projects with absolute file paths
• Fixed: Table did not update on deletion of token
• Changed: Extended duration of “no new tokens found” HUD
• Changed: Enter key now opens selected recent project in welcome screen

If you haven’t done so please post your feedback on iTunes. To be able to add additional features to Linguan we need to have sufficient sales. And for that we need your positive reviews, high rating and that you tell other developers about Linguan.

Today is the best day for them to also get a copy because: As a Thank You for your interest in our app we reduced the sale price by 50% until the new version gets approval by Apple.

Changes

• Fixed: potential crash on exporting tokens
• Fixed: on Export Missing Tokens + Translated Tokens = All Tokens
• Fixed: Undo bug when adding a new token
• Fixed: Location of HUD with app running on external monitor
• Fixed: red filename when opening a single strings file
• Fixed: entries in recent file list get duplicated
• Fixed: string parser did not properly deal with escaped characters
• Fixed: Warnings window scrollbar was cut off
• Fixed: Warnings and Errors should not be editable
• Fixed: Potential crash on closing a window or sending app into background
• Fixed: Problem saving files with French accent characters
• Fixed: Problem reading certain UTF16 files
• Fixed: Double-clicking a Warning should select the related token
• Fixed: Order of files to select for export was different from project tree
• Fixed: Warnings did not get flushed on revalidation
• Fixed: Inconsistencies in Wizard mode
• Fixed: Inconsistent handling of recent files
• Fixed: App no longer asks if you want to save the xcodeproj (which it does not modify)
• Fixed: you could open the same file twice
• Fixed: Inconsistent showing of Welcome window
• Fixed: Potential crash on reopening a file from recent file menu
• Fixed: confusing behavior of the setting for the token order in saved files
• Fixed: saving of files now cleans them up properly
• Fixed: Previous button was active in Wizard even when there was no previous token
• Changed: Error message improved when trying to import file that was not exported from Linguan
• Added: you can now add newlines in grid view with Alt+Enter, regular enter moves to the next row

I wanted to also get in several localizations and 10 volunteers jumped forward to provide translations of the tokens. But it turns out that this is only a third of the whole app. There are also many strings in XIBS and the help file. So instead of doing an incomplete job, I did not put these into this version just yet.

In Mac apps people tend to put more text in XIBs. Probably because there you have much more screen space which leads to more labels and setting all those in code would require many more outlets. But I ordered XIB support for 1.1. Linguan is localized in English and German at present, so I’m also taking the opportunity to add a German app store description which I found you can only add if the app is not yet approved. More languages will follow in another point release.

Another thing that did not make it for 1.0.1 is support for settings bundles because Xcode 4.2 seems to be in inconsistent about importing and handling these. So that needs a bit more research to support.

One thing that was also confusing was the naming of the “Last Import” auto-folder. If you scan your sources – Linguan uses genstrings for that – you will see new tokens appear there for quick access to what you need to add translations for. So we renamed that to “Last Scan”.

There are many more things that our enthusiastic users would like us to add, but as you can see we had our hands full at polishing up the 1.0 release. New features are being planned for the 1.1 version due later this year.

It would be awfully nice of you if you could help us spread the word about Linguan, here’s the app store link. And maybe a review on the app store, preferably with 5 stars? If you need support with Linguan please e-mail us.

UPDATE Nov 23rd: Now available.