Trying to guess new Sailfish OS features through localisation
My attempt at guessing what's coming with Sailfish OS 4.5 :)
Translation Round
Sailfish OS is available in many languages, and for most of them, the community is taking care of the translation, using the SFOS Pootle instance.
New translation rounds are announced on the SFOS Forum, and the one for SFOS 4.5 has been announced in this post.
Languages vs. Projects
Upon logging on the Sailfish OS localisation website, you'll see a list of languages and projects:
- There are 65 languages as I type this - not all of them have the same maturity, and you can see that in the "progress" status bar above.
- Projects is a categorisation of Sailfish OS features (e.g.
fingertermis the terminal, jolla-* is all Jolla specific features, like contacts, email, calculator etc).
How does it work?
I am the maintainer for French, so as soon as I got some time, I worked on it.
At a glance
The work to produce was not huge, by looking at the below screenshot, you can see that we're talking about 3% to be translated (either for "net-new" features, or small modifications).
For each project, you can see:
- the ones needing translation, and how many words - meaning a sentence could be 10 or 15 words,
- the suggestions are made by contributors, and the maintainer has to review them and validate or reject them.
Looking at what changed
By looking at the above screenshot, you can see that most changes occured in:
jolla-settings-system: all the strings in the System part of the Settings appjolla-settings-networking: everything related to networking: mobile, wifi, proxy, etcjolla-calendar: do I need to explain it? :)apk8d: Android AppSupportsailfish-utilities: strings about the SFOS Utilites app (the one allowing to e.g. restart the Fingerprint service, or Home screen)
The rest is less than ~25 words for each project, so 1 or 2 sentences maximum, meaning not much change.
So in the end, no core change, but rather some small improvements, looking at the changed files.
How to actually translate?
Here is how the translation looks like: for each string, you usually have a context, and a textbox where you can type your translation. Below, if a user has submitted a suggestion, you can review it and accept or reject it:
Sailfish OS 4.5
OK, let's dive into the files and try to identify some of the new features!
Settings
- The battery saver seems to have been improved, since it now includes the
ability to be more granular, like:
- charge to full, then apply tresholds,
- stop charging at specified value,
- keep battery level within specified range (looks similar to Battery Buddy, an application available on Openrepos).
- "Do Not Disburb" now includes more options, such as:
- Allow contacts from the addressbook to bypass DND,
- Allow only favorite contacts to bypass DND.
Networking
Most things I could spot were related to Proxies, which I do not use on SFOS, so I didn't really pay attention.
Calendar
If you're following David's "Sailfish Community News", you know that he includes a Repository roundup, which is a summary of the latest pull requests on Sailfish OS's GitHub repositories.
The SFOS Calendar is one that got plenty of attention lately, thanks to Damien Caliste's awesome work, and this translation round includes a few updates, including:
- message about daylight saving time, when creating an event,
- message about invitations with attendees who cannot be modified on the SFOS device.
Wrap Up
This is the first time I'm writting such a blog post, so let's see if I do it again with the next releases of Sailfish OS.
Not much has changed in terms of localisation with 4.5, meaning we don't get a lot of details about possible new features - I tried my best with the above indications, but I may have missed something big which was not part of the localisation :)
We'll see once Sailfish OS 4.5 has been released!
Tags: SailfishOS