Ok, here's today's "treasure of the week":

 

 

If you can tell us what "Ungefähr Seagate" was in the English original, you will receive the phrase "About <your company>" from us in all languages we offer - for free. 

 

A small hint: The displayed language is German.

 

For a long time we have been thinking how painfully extensive the effort of training new translators in our localization tools is. That's why we have finally decided to create some screencasts for our translators with step by step instructions on setting up the translation environment, translating with our tools, and – most importantly – performing effective proofing and quality inspection.

 

And that's the point: we have never done any screencasts before. At least not from scratch, so basically we will dive into this task and try to learn as much as possible.

 

Quality assurance is a very sensitive issue in app localization and our tools offer extensive functions, which however are not always that straight forward. Therefore we feel that a centralised set of screencasts available online will help our translators to deliver highest quality, resulting in a lower review effort and therefore faster submission to the App Store.

 

And, hey, what a great opportunity for my mixer, microphones and audio equipment to come out of hiding again.

 

It's time to say goodbye. Well, not forever, but at least for the rest of this year. The Wordcrafts team will be recharging their batteries the week after Christmas. Therefore we won't be able to take on any requests.

 

We will have an emergency email address up and running during this time, however we don't expect much workload since iTunes Connect will be shut down for Christmas holiday as well.

 

And please bear in mind when sending a request to our emergency address: These mails will undergo a thorough check by our wives to assess their urgency and they will send back a comprehensive questionaire requiring you to explain why your enquiry would be suited to spoil a well deserved family day off. And in case you get their OK, you'd have to compensate for a full family day at the nearest SPA around.   ;-)

 

It has been an amazing year with you guys and we would like to call out a big THANKS for your support and your confidence in our professional localization services. We have been working with amazingly enthusiastic and dedicated developers and it is great to see that you care as much about proper localization quality as we do. 

 

Enough bloating. Let's cut this short. We at Wordcrafts wish you a great holiday season! Enjoy some relaxing days with your family and friends. We hope to see you again in 2012.

 

Olli & Felix

 

as you may have read on our home page, we're attending WWDC this year again.

We're doing this for two reasons: First, we are highly interested in the localization-related sessions and labs to keep up to date with the development. We are always happy to help you with your localization projects and assist you in checking whether your project is ready for localization or not. We can imagine that there are more interesting sessions for you (all this API, CoreData and Framework stuff …) so we do the job and attend those rather boring sessions for you.

 

Second reason is that we believe that during WWDC you guys get inspired to make new applications, develop new ideas and – a great opportunity – solve your "old " problems by talking to Apple engineers. To encourage you to think about localization early and to make this topic a less stressful and sometimes even annoying step of your development, simply join us to discuss possible issues as early as in your "idea-stage".

 

Oh, and there is a third reason why we are there:
To finally meet our customers in person and maybe even have a laugh about specific situations that occurred during past localization projects.

 

To cut a long story short:

 

Follow us on Twitter or drop us a line. We’d be happy to hear from you.

 

Twitter: @wordcrafts

What is it with all those guys out there twittering from their business accounts "I have donated, you should too"? Don‘t get me wrong, donation for those in need is great, and I think everybody could save money somehow (don‘t buy a coffee at S***bucks next time or drink less beer) and donate it. And yes, it is great to remind people to donate using twitter. We all feel really sad for the people in Japan who are affected by the earthquake and tsunami and we all should offer all the help we can.

 

But please: Donate silently.

 

Donation should not be part of an image campaign suggesting "Hey, I have donated, you can buy my products 'cause I am a good guy". In the best case this is playing with the misery of people, in the worst case this is actually not even caring for those in need but solely for the image of your business. Your image campaign won't work on me. 

 

So please: start donating and stop showing off.

 

Here's the link to the American Red Cross donation page: http://american.redcross.org

Do you know Murphy’s Law? Well, when moving our website and groupware services to our own Mac machine and have it maintained in a Mac-specialized data center, we did everything we could to ensure everything would work fine from day one. Setting up the system, webserver, groupware... and testing and reviewing our new site, we finally felt ready yesterday.

 

Obviously, we were wrong: In believing that we could take the email setup for granted, we didn’t notice that a tiny little setting for the info@ address had to be changed. 

 

Having noticed our mistake, we asked ourselves how that could have happened?

A colleague commented: "Hey that’s like opening a new cafe or restaurant and forgetting the keys at home on the grand opening day!”. Sad, but very true.

 

To cut a long story short:

 

info@ works now. We apologize for any inconveniences this may have caused. In case you got a bounce yesterday, please be so kind to resend your mail today.

 

And thanks again, @nicolapo, for pinging us on Twitter!

Or how we like to call it: The new center of localization excellence. Ok, honestly - we like it and we hope you like it too.

 

But let me tell a little story about how we made it this far:

Once upon a time (about a year and a half ago) there were two guys who specialized on Mac OS and iOS localizations. During a serious business meeting and plenty of not too alcoholic beverages (namely beer) they decided on a new website design for their business. So they went on to brainstorm on ideas and came up with a great design idea. Enthusiastically they pursued their idea and finally managed to create what they thought was a great draft for their new website. What they did not know back then: they were really crap at webdesign. They hired an external web developer to turn their draft into a functioning web page. Said and done. The new website was online and everybody was happy. The two guys for having an all new website and their web developer for having earned some money.

 

As time passed, a good friend of these guys who happened to be a Mac developer carefully proposed some improvements on the webdesign. Ah, no, that is not true actually. What he really said was: "Get a new website. This one is crap!" It slowly came to these guys‘ minds that their current website was not as good as they thought. So they hired a proper web designer and had him create an all new shiny website that reflected their personalities and their business.

 

And here they are, on March 10, presenting their new online presence to the audience and having realized that they should really stick to what they are good in: Localization of Mac OS and iOS apps.

 

The new website is only the beginning: We are implementing an online collaboration tool to enhance the overall experience and will also offer some innovative new services soon.

 

Make sure to regulary check the blog for new articles: There is a lot about localization, UI design and much more we would like to share with you. Simply follow us on Twitter or subscribe to the RSS feed.

 

Thanks!