Hi all. It’s been a while since the last Podium release, so I thought I’d give you an update on what is coming up. The next Podium release will be 3.3, so it’s a feature update. I’ve been working on a major revision of the project start page, but I don’t have anything yet to show about this feature.
The purpose of this post is to present another upcoming feature: Support for translating the Podium UI to other languages. The idea for this translation system came about as I was doing a revision of how Podium handles texts internally.
Those of you that have been Podium users for a long time may remember that the Podium Guide was originally written on a wiki page on the older zynewave.com website. I since ported the guide to Google Docs, and made a utility that could convert that to the current podium-guide.html document. This has been a tedious process to maintain, so the Guide has been neglected for a long time. There are still chapters in the guide that have not been written out.
In the recent years new technologies have emerged that I believe can make the maintenance of the Podium guide simpler: GitHub.com and the markdown document format. I’ve made some experiments on how the translation can be implemented. Have a look here:
https://github.com/zynewave/Podium-public-resources/tree/master/Guide
The ‘podium-guide.md’ document is the old podium-guide.html document that I’ve converted to markdown. If you click the document you can see that GitHub renders markdown documents as nicely formatted html.
The translation system is fairly simple, but I underestimated how much work is involved with making all Podium UI texts translatable :-O It’s going to be a while before the entire Podium UI is made translatable. I’ll probably add the feature (as described on the GitHub readme page) with partial translation support to the next release, so that interested users can experiment with it.
Another benefit of this new translation system, is that it will force me to keep the guide updated for each new release, since it will be required to display texts for new features properly.
The ‘Podium-public-resources’ repository can grow to include other things that users can make contributions to: Color Setups, Editor Setups, Note Maps, MIDI Snippets, Hardware Definitions, etc.
Would any of you be interested in contributing to the translation into your native language?
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