Notices

(Somewhat a proposal, plz)

Many people wants to use the applications in their own language based on the localized settings. The applications automatically choose the language based on the country+language settings in the system preferences, if the application has the needed customized language files installed.

However, when asking help on the forum, going through FAQs, or reporting bug reports or feature requests it would be very useful somehow to be able quickly and user friendly way to change the language back and forth to English and to the ones native language.

Now the only way to do this in all N900 applications I have tried, is to change the language setting in the main preferences and reboot the device - not good enough.


So, I think it could be a good guideline to application developers to enable a feature into the application to change between de-facto official developer-language English and user's device configured local language easily. For example a menu command in Help-main menu of the application. If the langauge switch could be done on the fly, without restarting the application, even better, but just having to restart the application would not matter either, as long the whole device doesn't need to be rebooted.

I suppose those who are developers, develop mainly within scratchbox so what about export LANG=language_code_of_your_choose before run-standalone.sh???

Start from xterminal with

Works on the device too. You just have to start the app from xterm.
Edit: pointed out above already, didn't notice.

Also, it probably wouldn't be difficult to create a simple "run with language" app, that would do this with a nice GUI.

Ok, so users can do this already if they know how to start the application from a CLI. Sometimes the command line is not obvious even if you know the application's name.

Maybe it is not needed to have a GUI command in every application then (in Help/ -menu for example), but as Juise- said a separate GUI program which would know all applications installed and could run anything with LC_MESSAGES="en_GB" enabled.

Those who are making bug reports and feature requests, can probably use also the CLI method, but those who are just searching for help from forums and from FAQs defenetly could use an easy GUI-mode of doing this and switch back and forth from en_GB and their native language.

Does any developer know could this be done on the fly when the program is running? (or is the language fixed in the initial mapping stage of the program run?)