ResFinder v0.07
ResFinder v0.07 |
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This was good. A nice compact tidy application.
Unfortunately, back in the old days, we English speakers pretty much forgot that the rest of the world exists. Or we just didn't care that some people parle français or hablar español, or what-have-you.
The more progressive developers embedded an extra language or two into their software, but this suffered the problem that perhaps their experience of the language isn't as good as they think it is (I've been in France a decade but I know if I tried to translate an app, real French people would think "huh?"). It also suffers from the problem that you're stuck with the pre-chosen selection.
Enter Paths and MessageTrans!
With a little help from RISC OS, it is possible to place localised resources in a directory appropriate to the country name in a "Resources" directory. Pretty much like this:
Now, you might only offer English ("UK"), but that doesn't matter, for crowdsourcing can help. All it takes is a foreign language speaker with a good grasp of English to copy your English resources and change the text to their language, and at the end you could have something like this:
But - you need something to make that work, right? Well, you could look up the various language SWIs and such. Or you could just leave it in the hands of ResFinder. The ResFinder program is tight - a kilobyte and a half of carefully crafted assembler - which will look for the appropriate language resources and set the appname$Path system variable accordingly.
Here is an example !Run file:
It's that simple!
Did you notice the ResFinder$PlatformClass in the !Run file above?
As an added feature, ResFinder will detect and report on the "class" of the machine, and set a system variable that you can examine.
| Class | Description |
| 0 | System could not be identified. |
| 1 | A "Mesolithic" system (anything 26 bit). |
| 2 | RiscPC or RiscPC-like (A7000, RPCEmu, etc). |
| 3 | Iyonix. |
| 4 | OMAP3 (Beagle, Beagle xM, etc). |
| 5 | OMAP4 (Pandaboard). |
| 6 | RaspberryPi. |
ResFinder is released under the EU Public Licence - sort of like GPL without the bull.
You can also browse the latest source on-line, with !Zap style colouring: