Fine-grained applications menu

Some time ago I wrote a proposal for reorganizing app menu.

I started implementing it a month ago by writing an alternative applications.menu. As it relies on freedesktop.org spec categories specified in .desktop files, and not all applications are good citizens in that regard, my first steps were to bug application developers to add subcategories to their apps' .desktop files. I also walked through KDE apps and updated their desktop files. All the bugs I reported were fixed, except for the OpenOffice.org one.

Of course, I made a screencast of the results.

I prepared a simple script that you can run [as root] to get same results. The package also contains updated .desktop files (it installs desktop files only for apps present in your system), and it backs up the old kde4-applications.menu (yes, in my debian system it has kde4- prefix).

If anyone likes the alternative layout please let me know.

First results implementing OpenDocument translation workflow

This is how OpenDocument translation workflow will look like in KDE 4.3: Screencast

Don't try to do it yourself right now ;) This requires the latest (unreleased) versions of translate-toolkit trunk and kdelibs trunk.

Implications of achieving this
I plugged kross nicely into Lokalize: I introduced 'project kinds' -- each has it's own set of scripts, so that you have 'Merge into ODF' for OpenDocument translation, and 'Widget Text Capture' for GUI/KDE projects.

These actions, as well as few others (see kde l10n svn and kde ru l10n svn for their plug example) are written in python. I plan to create a separate scripting API docs for Lokalize, but for now you can just rgrep Q_SCRIPTABLE KDE/kdesdk/lokalize to get list of available methods.

This mechanism will make implementing business-logic easy. Examples are action to send your translation to project's editor (translation team leader) and action to commit your work to [svn] repository if you have write access to it.

Thanks
I want to say thanks to Sebastian Sauer for giving me the green light for kross-extending commits, and Wynand Winterbach for commiting the patch to translate-toolkit.
Once I've got the thanks section, I'd also like to mention NLNet Foundation which funds my current efforts and KDevelop team, which makes those efforts efficient (today I opened whole kdelibs in KDevelop, and it took 15 minutes and 0 crashes to scan it completely ;) )

Comment your translations

It it sometimes useful to leave a note for an individual translation (for example when you're unsure about some term). Since some time ago scripty (a daemon which updates KDE translation files to reflect the current state) started to preserve comments in GETTEXT PO files. XLIFF standard supports notes too. So this week I was addding notes support to Lokalize.

Notes mechanism may also be used for bookmarking, as Lokalize now allows quick searching including notes (I added 'options' button to set additional filtering critera). Check this out on the video.


I wrote a simple python-based action to merge translated XLIFF file back to .odt document. Next week I'll be writing patches for traslate-toolkit to support on-the-fly conversion and filling <file origin""> attribute, and now I'm preparing a patch for Kross to help me make organizing project-specific scripts easy.

I also added UI reflection of 'recovered from autosave' state. You'll need kdelibs>=4.2.1 for autosave to work properly though.

Compiling Lokalize from trunk under KDE 4.2