iBank has long had French language support. But when we released iBank 4, we removed all localizations because we made so many changes to the underlying code that we needed completely new sets of translations. Now I’m pleased to announce that iBank 4.2.1, which is just around the corner, will have complete French localization (except for the help files).

For us English-speaking developers, what is perhaps more interesting than the actual localization is the mechanism by which we did it. As Cocoa developers know, the usual way to localize an app is to maintain multiple copies of NIB files for each supported language (NIB files are used for loading the majority of user interface elements). This approach, while easy to do, is plagued with long- and even short-term problems. So we decided to use a more dynamic method described by Wil Shipley.

While this approach isn’t without its own flaws, the benefits seem to far outweigh the costs. We contributed some code to Mr. Shipley’s DMLocalizedNibBundle.m file to support translating toolbars, table view columns and tab views. You can ask him for it.

So that’s a brief update about French coming to iBank 4.

-Ian

P.S. I’m looking forward to having some screenshots from iBank Investor to share, but we aren’t quite there yet.

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Ian Gillespie

CEO/Founder at IGG Software, Inc.

A California native, Ian's academic background was in biology, botany and environmental studies. He comes to the field of technology purely out of personal passion, and has been writing Mac software for over a decade. He's also an avid birdwatcher, a soccer player, fiddler and an organic gardener. He lives in Oregon with his wife and their two sons.

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