Progress, Localization, and AppImage

Published: 18th of July, 2020

The past few months have been rather eventful for me, as I'm sure they have been for many if not most people. Even though my plans for the past few months all of the sudden changed completely, one small positive side effect is that I do have a little more time to work on PhotoQt. There have been a good few changes in the development branch in the git repository recently. The next release, version 2.0, is still a little ways off, but I hope to have everything ready some time this fall.

There are two changes to the localization and delivery of PhotoQt I want to highlight today:

In the past there have been many amazing volunteers who stepped forward to translate PhotoQt into another language. Usually, two or three weeks before each release I updated the language files in Transifex and hoped that everybody had enough time to finish their language. This put a lot of pressure on each volunteer, and I'm sorry for this. This will be different from now on:

First, the platform has changed from Transifex to Crowdin. Even though there is nothing wrong with Transifex in general, I believe Crowdin will be a better fit for PhotoQt going forward. Any existing translations from Transifex have been moved over to Crowdin.
Whenever any change in code is pushed to the git repository, GitLab will automatically start a job in the background updating the language and uploading any potential changes to Crowdin. In my testing it usually took somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes before a changed string in the code showed up in Crowdin. Crowdin, in return, will push updated translations automatically to this git repository. This will allow each volunteer to work on their translations alongside the development of PhotoQt, allowing for a lot more flexibility.

If you have been part of PhotoQt's translation team in the past or if you would like to become part of it, I want to invite you to join the project on Crowdin. If you want to start a translation in any language that is not listed there yet, just let me know either on Crowdin or by email and I can add it.

The second thing I want to highlight is that it is now possible to easily test the latest development snapshot. Every day at midnight UTC a new AppImage is created based on the latest snapshot. Even though here have been many changes and additions and bug fixes already, there likely are still many bugs around (if you want to got on a hunt for some bugs, please do!), and a few things are still missing. However, if you're curious, this is a super easy way to take a peak a what's coming up, just download the AppImage and run it. This link will always point to the latest AppImage available.

If you have any questions about any of the above, or anything else related to PhotoQt, please feel free to get in touch with me.

Enjoy PhotoQt,

Lukas Spies