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Feature

Not Speaking Gibberish to your Users is Good

Utilizing "Smart Localization" in Mac OS X

Issue: 2.3 (December/January 2003)
Author: Thom McGrath
Author Bio: Thom has been working with REALbasic since version 2, programming for 10 years across 15 different languages.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 13,166
Starting Page Number: 24
RBD Number: 2311
Resource File(s):

2311a.sit Updated: Thursday, December 18, 2003 at 9:57 AM
2311b.sit Updated: Thursday, December 18, 2003 at 9:57 AM

Related Web Link(s):

http://www.bitjuggler.com/products/appbundler/
http://realbasic.thezaz.com/
http://www.tildesoft.com/Code.html
http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/index.shtml

Known Limitations: None

Excerpt of article text...

Introduction
Most developers have considered localization for their projects. REALbasic makes attempts to assist in the process, but managing multiple builds can be difficult. Creating a custom localization scheme is possible, but requires additional files that need to stay with the application.
Mac OS X introduced an ability to load different resources depending on the user's language preferences. With no interaction with the program at all, the Operating System (OS) grabs only the resources needed. It does this using bundles.
REALbasic applications can utilize this ability, with a little work. This tutorial assumes some advanced REALbasic skills and a good understanding of Mac OS X.
We'll be using REALbasic 5.2.1. You will also need a copy of Thomas Reed's App Bundler, available for free at http://www.bitjuggler.com/products/appbundler/, my Placement Module and Dynamic Localization Module available at http://realbasic.thezaz.com/(editor's note: these two modules are also available from the RB Developer website), Kevin Ballard's Carbon Declare Library at http://www.tildesoft.com/Code.html, and a program which supports editing UTF-16 encoded text files. BBEdit is the weapon of choice for most programmers. You can download a demo from http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/index.shtml, the full version costs $179, or $119 if you use BBEdit Lite, Adobe GoLive, or Macromedia Dreamweaver 3.0 (or later). If you have Apple's Developer Tools installed, Project Builder will also do the job, though it's a little overkill. But it's free, so who cares?

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