in Code, Geeklife, Gubatron

Easier Internationalization in LimeWire

Many LimeWire users always come to tech support asking what can they do to have their LimeWire display on their native language. This can be done by going to the View menu, and selecting the last option, then you’ll see a submenu with all the languages available.

If you don’t speak a word of spanish, finish, portuguese, or chinese, you can imagine how hard it is to switch the language… The same for users that don’t speak a word of english and they open LimeWire only to find a program they can barely understand.

This is why I decided to embark on my first LimeWire branch ever, something that would intuitively take you to the language selection functionality.

Suppose this is the first time you’re using LimeWire and you or someone else by mistake switches LimeWire’s language to Finnish or any other language you have no clue about, next time you open LimeWire, you’ll see something like this.

Personally, if this was my first or second time using LimeWire, as it is now, I wouldn’t know that “Vaihda Kieli” has anything to do with changing Languages, but If I see the flag of Finlad or any other country in the bottom, maybe I’d click on that to see If I can change the language back to english.

This would be another example if you found your LimeWire in spanish, as you can see in the bottom bar, the Spanish flag is displayed. Click on the picture to make bigger.

Once you click on the flag, the Language Selection window will be displayed, from it you can choose any of the languages available, and next time you restart LimeWire the new internationalization locales will be loaded.


This is the new dialog. You can hide it from the Status bar by unmarking that checkbox
You can also hide it by right clicking on the status bar and unselecting it from the listIf you want to see the source code of this branch, you can always check out the changes on our FishEye page.

I expect you’ll find this an useful LimeWire future, let’s hope we’ll be seing this merged to the Main branch and released for all of you to use anytime soon. Some of my plans include publishing a tool that will help volunteer translators bring LimeWire to many other Languages. For personal experience I know we have an amazing user base in countries like Poland where you can find very smart developers, still I can’t believe our Polish translation isn’t included on our public released versions, hopefully this will change soon with all these i18n efforts.

Gubatron.

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