We're getting ready to release another beta version of Zoundry Raven in the next few days. One of the new features that will finally be present is a User Interface for translating Raven into other languages. Zoundry Blog Writer had this feature, and it made the translation process go much more smoothly. First of all, let me just give a huge thanks to those Raven fans who have offered to do translations for various languages. We really appreciate it, since we don't have the resources necessary to do it ourselves. And of course, my standard apology for taking so long to get it implemented: sorry!

The Translation User Interface is pretty simple. There is a Translation Manager that can be accessed from the main Help menu. The Translation Manager displays a list of translations already present (currently none). You can use the Translation Manager to edit existing translations and add new translations. When you create a new translation, the New Translation dialog presents you with a list of languages (which is defaulted to the one that matches your system locale).

Once you have one or more translation in the list, you can go ahead and start translating. Do this by double-clicking on a translation or selecting one and clicking Edit. The window that pops up is the Translation Editor window. Use the Translation Editor window to do your translating. Once you are done (you can stop at any time and resume later), don't forget to click Save.

Here is a quick tip when using the Translation Editor: if you have a bundle string selected in the list, hitting the ENTER key will move the focus to the translation text box. After typing your translation, hitting ENTER again will register the change and set the focus back up to the list. If you have the "Show only untranslated strings" option enabled, you can do translations very quickly by hitting ENTER again (as the next string in the list would have been selected automatically).

Technorati : zoundry raven translation localization i18n

Labels: zoundry raven translation localization i18n

Well, it's been almost three weeks since we did our first public beta release of Raven. We've been getting a lot of feedback from our users (thanks!) and so far it has been overwhelmingly positive. We have some bugs, and we have a lot of work to do before we can release a 1.0 version, but I think we're off to a good start. I think we're closing in on 1000 users of Raven - we should probably hit that number today or tomorrow, actually. A big thanks to everyone that has downloaded and tried the beta.

Stick with us, Raven will only get better with age!

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Labels: raven, zoundry

During the alpha testing (and now beta) period of Zoundry Raven, you may come across a defect that may not be easy for us to figure out with visual symptoms alone. This is where logging becomes very useful, especially debug logs, and we may occasionally ask you to enable the debug logging, reproduce the defect, and mail us a zipped copy of the log files.

The typical steps are:

1. Exit: If the application is already running, then save your work and exit the application.
2. Clean the old logs: Go to the directory where the log files are located and delete (or move to an different location) old log files. The log files are located in the path_to_your_profile/logs directory. For example:
   
   C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\My Documents\ZoundryRavenProfile\logs.
   
3. Start the application.
4. Enable Debug Logging: From the application Tools top menu, choose Preferences. Then under the General/Logging section, check enable the "Enable Debugging Messages" check box.
5. Reproduce the error: Repeat the steps that caused the original problem.
6. Exit the application.
7. Zip up the logs files (all files in the logs/ directory) and mail them to support at zoundry dot com.

Labels: how-to

Ok ok, so there was a huge (enormous) delay in getting back to this blog. My apologies to everyone for that. One of the major hurdles to contributing regularly to this blog was a technical problem we had with our host. But now we have that issue resolved, and now everything actually works! (thanks Nick!)

The big news, of course, is that Zoundry Raven has finally entered Public Beta status. We still have a ton of stuff to do, but we felt that it was stable enough to start building a real user base. Thanks very much to all of those Alpha users out there who gave us some great feedback. We haven't acted on all of it yet, of course, but we really are tracking it all.

Two, hopefully short, additions to the product are currently in the works. The first is a "Portable" version of Raven. This shouldn't be too hard to implement, since we don't make use of the Windows registry for anything other than installation and uninstallation. I'm looking into now, and the only trouble spot seems to be templates (although we have all sorts of other problems with templates that need to be addressed). The second addition is a Translation UI. Zoundry Blog Writer had a built-in dialog/window that would facilitate translating it into other languages. We have had quite a few requests for something similar in Raven, so we are getting to work on that. Again, it will be a pretty simple UI, so it shouldn't take too long to get that going.

Thanks to everyone out there using the product. We really hope that Raven is the foundation for a great piece of software and a premier tool for bloggers.

I will do my best to update this blog more frequently in the future. Now that we have our technical difficulties worked out, I think I might succeed. Wish me luck.