Michal Čihař - Archive for 5/2014

Rewamping UI for Weblate

For quite some time I was pretty confident that Weblate will need some UI rewrite at some point. This is always problematic thing for me as I'm no way an UI designer and thus I always hope that somebody else will do that. I've anyway spent few hours on train home from LinuxTag to check what I could do with that.

The first choice for me was to try Twitter Bootstrap as I've quite good experience with using that for UI at work, so I hoped it will work quite well for Weblate as well. The first steps went quite nicely, so I could share first screenshots on Twitter and continue to work on that.

After few days, I'm quite happy with basic parts of the interface, though the most important things (eg. the page for translating) are still missing. But I think it's good time to ask for initial feedback on that.

Main motivation was to unite two tab layout used on main pages, which turned out to be quite confusing as most users did not really get into bottom page of the page and thus did not find important functions available there. So all functions are accessible from top page navigation, either directly or being in menu.

I've also decide to use colors a bit more to indicate the important things. So the progress bars are more visible now (and the same progress bar now indicates status of translation per words). The quality checks also got their severity, which in turn is used to highlight the most critical ones. The theme will probably change a bit (so far it's using default theme as I did not care much to change that).

So let's take a look at following screenshot and let me know your thoughts:

Number of applications over time

You can also try that yourself, everything is developed in the bootstrap branch in our Git repository.

Weblate 1.9

Weblate 1.9 has been released today. It comes with lot of improvements and bug fixes and with experimental Zen mode for editing translations.

Full list of changes for 1.9:

  • Django 1.6 compatibility.
  • No longer maintained compatibility with Django 1.4.
  • Management commands for locking/unlocking translations.
  • Improved support for Qt TS files.
  • Users can now delete their account.
  • Avatars can be disabled.
  • Merged first and last name attributes.
  • Avatars are now fetched and cached server side.
  • Added support for shields.io badge.

You can find more information about Weblate on http://weblate.org, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user. Ready to run appliances will be soon available in SUSE Studio Gallery.

Weblate is also being used https://l10n.cihar.com/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Weblate itself and others.

If you are free software project which would like to use Weblate, I'm happy to help you with set up or even host Weblate for you.

Further development of Weblate would not be possible without people providing donations, thanks to everybody who have helped so far!

Going to LinuxTag

Together with many phpMyAdmin guys, I'm traveling to LinuxTag 2014 in few days. We'll have a booth there (hall 6, booth A13), where we will show some demos and you can stop by and chat with us.

Of course my presence there will not be just about phpMyAdmin, I'll meet there few Weblate users and developers, but if you have anything else to discuss, just stop by, I'll be usually around the booth.