Add a plugin in a language Address Book does not support

[cimm]

Dear MacRumours,

I'm writing an Address Book plug in, called ZipCarton (http://www.milkcarton.be/apps/zipcarton). It tries to find the postal code matching the city and country for a given address using the GeoNames webservice. So far so good. Now, people translated ZipCarton to different languages: Catalan and Hungarian amongst them. The problem is Address Book is not available in Catalan or Hungarian. Even if I change my default Mac OS X language or Hungarian Address Book is still in English and the plugin as well (the plugin has a Hungarian Localizable.strings file).

I think Address Book passes the language to the plug in which makes it impossible to show the Hungarian version. The Catalan translator told me he copied the Catalan Localizable.strings over the English one to solve the problem but this is not something I want to advise.

Does anyone know how to solve this?

[Krevnik]

The application host determines the language, you are right. While I completely understand the desire to offer more translations of your product, I don't think it is a great idea to go beyond what Address Book offers, or do hacks that would cause the UI to display in both one language, and another.

Mostly I say this from the standpoint that an app that displays in two languages at the same time might be confusing, and slow down the user as they sort of mentally 'context-switch' between the languages while using the app.

I'd keep the translated files, and perhaps swap out the English resource with the translated resources to test them on your machine... but otherwise leave them alone. Maybe petition Apple to translate Address Book into more languages for your users.

[cimm]

Thank you for the reply Krevnik.

I think I can follow your opinion, it may be confusing to have different languages within the same application. Better stick with the default application language. Think we'll have to wait until Apple decides to support the languages currently missing in Leopard.