I just spent a day at Flock HQ in Victoria.
I never had a chance to meet any of them when I was working for Flock, but they all seem to be very friendly and aware of the past, so I didn’t have to go through the rather confusing moment of explaining why I’m there and who I am. 🙂
We were chatting about the future of Flock, plans for the next year and a bit (hey, we’re Canada) weather… 😉
It’s exciting to see them moving forward beyond 2.0 (gosh, I remember I couldn’t imagine Flock 1.0…). One of the topics was of course l10n, especially they had several problems with it which resulted in lack of Flock 2.0 l10n releases for a few months now.
It seems they have a clear plan to release Flock 2.0.3 early January with all locales finally. I did my best to politely express how much localizers are pissed off by lack of their release on the very day of en-US release. We’ll see… 😉
I also demoed silme and l20n concepts which was received with a warmth welcome. It seems they are interested in the area and I will keep them up to date. It would be extremely valuable if they decided to devote some coding power to silme based webtool, but I don’t expect that anytime very soon. Maybe once we’re near the release?
One concept we covered was HTML localization. I had HTML localization on my mind since the early days of silme and they motivated me to rethink the concept.
Basically we could use XPath for getting ID’s and then get values. The crucial part is to make sure we split phases when we localize or change localization, and phases when we change layout. Only then we can update XPath based ID’s accordingly to avoid double localization… I’ll dig it deeper over weekend.