Did I eat my own dogfood ?

Yes and no. I have actually used appTranslator.exe itself as a module in my test projects since the very beginning. But until fairly recently, it was testing only. Even if I sometimes had the feeling that I was eating my own dog food, I was not.

I actually started to work on the French version of appTranslator a few weeks ago (for the ones who didn't get it yet, or who recently stepped aboard, I'm a French speaking Belgian). And I must say I was quite happy with the result. I think I'm going to buy that stuff :-D

Doing this exercice did indeed helped me find a big bug (The kind that takes a few minutes to fix but that makes you look like a fool by your clients !)

So why doesn't appTranslator ship in French as well ? It would certainly make trial users more confident into the product, even if they don't actually use the French version.

The reason is that I'm quite fanatic about consistency. I don't imagine to ship a French version of the program without a French version of the online help. And I didn't find enough time to translate the help yet. I confess I'm slowly changing my mind: I may decide to include the French version soon.

Also, I plan to write an article (with source code) about the use of satellite DLLs. I'll probably include the French version as an illustration of the use of that code when it's ready.

appTranslator Official Release

It looked much like a pregnancy : All kinds of emotions and almost as much time. The baby is born eventually, one week ahead of schedule. And he looks very healthy ! Needless to say that his parent(s) are very proud :-)

appTranslator v1.0 is officially released !

Pfeew!!! Releasing software is exciting. And tiring. You always think you're done. Then you check one more detail. And one more. And you discover that damn little bug that is so obvious that you wonder how it managed to slip through the net until then !

But I'm done ! I started to work full time on appTranslator 6 months ago. Back then, I decided that the limit to release version 1.0 was... 6 months, iow June 1st. I'm pretty to proud to be ahead of schedule. So far it's been a nice adventure. Of course, I had to drop a couple of features. But hey, it's version 1.0 !

It's now time to start spreading the word about it and put my sales/marketing cap. Not one I'm used to wear !

The nice coincidence is that I attend a completely unrelated party tonight. So I don't even have to organize one myself :-)

"Why put the effort into internationalization you ask?"

Dr International, who recently entered the blogosphere, replies today.

By the way, yes, there is a Dr International. He looks much like the infamous Dr GUI except that he talks about internationalization of software (er... yes!).

Internationalization and localization definitely are a growing market.

CRLFs follow-up

A few weeks ago, I wrote a rant about CR and LFs.

Michka just wrote about line terminations as well. And he reminded me that Raymond Chen also covered this issue some time ago.

Things I just don't get...

Sending error reports to MS may actually help

Earlier today, I was burning a back-up CD when suddenly my computer rebooted. Oh! an XP crash ! I thought it was probably due to some CD-burning code in a device driver.

When the computer was up again, an error report dialog popped up (not exactly the same text as on the picture but you get the idea)



I decided to click the 'Send' button (I'm a very co-operative guy ;-).

After a few seconds, my browser opened and displayed a page from the MS site explaining that the problem was known and due to my CD burning program. And it even gave me a direct link to the downloadable fix on the manufacturer site !

Wow!

My first testimonial is from... Joel Spolsky!

[appTranslator] looks like a very slick and smart solution to a common problem...
- Joel Spolsky

yessir !!! And I'll tell you what: I'm damn happy ! :-)

The story behind it was pretty stressing though. It all started on Saturday afternoon. Someone subscribed to my mailing list and wrote in the reference field of the form : 'joel on software blog'.

What ? Joel wrote about appTranslator ?? You can imagine how fast I rushed to joelonsoftware.com. Alas, nothing ! I made a site wide search and found no ref of appTranslator. From there on I didn't insist and opened Joel's Business of Software forum, which I hadn't visited for a couple of weeks. And there it was ! A post entitled 'App Translator - an interesting idea'. Suddenly things started to go bad. Really bad (at least in my mind). The OP was anonymous (I have no idea who it was). And a few people reacted negatively saying it was just a disguised ad.
Boy, I hate that: appTranslator is about to be known in the JoS sphere as a source of spam :-( VERY VERY BAD !!!
I immediately replied to the post to clarify the situation, but I was concerned it was not enough. I also e-mailed Joel and Eric Sink (since Eric is the official host of the forum) to tell them that, please, believe me, I'm not a spammer !
I must say that Joel rocks : In less than an hour, he replied to me, deleted the negative comments from the thread and added his own-follow up comment, raving about appTranslator ! Pffff.... Problem solved. The Master of Ceremony established the Truth and gave me His Blessing :-) I felt much better !

At this point, I must add that I had asked him for a link in a French translation of his articles that I made a couple of years ago. He declined but it looks like he gave a look to my product, which I hadn't asked.

The dang thing had stressed me so much (probably much more than it diserved) that it took me 2 hours to realize the value of this comment from Joel: The best testimonial I could dream of !

I mailed him earlier today to ask his permission to reproduce his comment on my website (The JoS forum site doesn't mention any copyright on the contents but I'd rather have his agreement). "Sure!" was his reply.

I'm so happy :-)

Conclusion

Feel free to evangilize the world about appTranslator :-)
But please be careful to the backfire I may be victim of ! There might not always be a fireman as efficient as Joel. If you're posting to a forum with a big audience (good idea!), make sure it cannot be mistaken for Astroturfing, because, as Joel told me, there are lots of self-appointed moderators that will be too happy to attack appTranslator (and whether they're right is the least of their concerns).

PS: Don't look for the testimonial on apptranslator.com right now. I'm going to change the contents of the home page soon. It wil appear then. Edited on May 24: Joel's words are now in good place ;-)

Unicode filenames cannot be zipped

Of course WinZip et al can zip your Unicode data. But MichKa discovered that the name of zipped files cannot be Unicode !

BTW, if you're looking for an high end blogger about i18n, l10n et al, Michael Kaplan's blog (aka MichKa) is the place.

He's a Microsoftie who was already famous before he became a Microsoftie:

1. He wrote the MSLU (and wrote about MSLU !)
2. He's the author of a great book: Internationalization with Visual Basic.

New beta version. Beta testers wanted.

appTranslator version 0.54 is out there.

Releasing a version is always hard work. Even for beta versions ! There is such an amount of things that you need to double-check before eventually posting the version... But there it is, at last ! I was so tired yesterday evening that I didn't even find the energy to blog about it !

There's quite a bunch of new stuff in it. It's particularly exciting because it's supposed to mark the end of new developments for version 1.0. From now on, there should be bug fixes only. Of course, since I'm a dev, it will be hard not to add a couple of small things here and there.

As of now, I'll put my sales guy cap and work on the sales and marketing issues. Some of them are technical : Creating a demo version, setting up the e-commerce process,... Marketing will include SEO, Web site enhancements, set up of an ad campaign (according to what I can afford :-( ), creating a data sheet and maybe a PowerPoint presentation in case I find people geographically close enough to visit them,...

That's a whole new job for me. It's pretty challenging because it forces me to do things that I wasn't doing in my previous jobs, even though I had on eye on them.

Please sign all your background programs

I'm back from spending a couple of hours cleaning a friend's computer. The kind of computer that I feel like throwing into a formalin jar and send it directly to the F-Secure labs !

It's one of these times when people call you in despair: As soon as it booted, their computer will start giving all sorts of weird messages. They don't even need to touch the keyboard to be flooded by adware pop-ups.

The first thing I usually do is run SysInternal's excellent AutoRun to find all exes and dlls scattered all over the place, uncheck the suspicious ones, kill the matching processes and reboot.

That's where there's room for easy improvement: If all the good guys would digitally sign their exes and dlls that run unattended (whether services, programs hidden in the system tray or IE add-ons), it would be way easier to isolate the malware: Just look for unsigned stuff.

The problem now is that you must be very careful before removing suspicious programs because you're never sure it's not some important third-party program such as an ADSL modem or video display-related utility. These are too often thrown into the system32 directory and don't even have a version info resource :-(