Lockdown now in German

Famous last words

"It certainly took longer than I thought"

That sort of describes my attempts at providing Lockdown in German. I've thought it would be fun (yes fun) to make a localized plugin.

"No problem" I thought "First I need to find someone who actually speaks German"

Enter Marc Widmer who is from Switzerland where everyone (apparently) speaks about 5 different languages.

"Ok, now how do I actually do this"

Enter ilocalize which is also from a couple of brothers who are, curiously, also from Switzerland and who have a company called "Arizona Software" which, in case you are wondering, is not at all close to Switzerland.

"Great... Let's see just type in the german words where the english words, hit save ... ok that should be it"


.... Hmmm.. still in english
... Hmmm

Read more docs from apple where they say things like "You don't have to do anything really... it's all automatic"

Hmmmm....

(Each Hmmm is several weeks passing)

So I finally sat down and got it working... It's not pretty folks. You see the fine folks at apple never actually considered (as far as I can tell) that an application may not be localize but a plugin may. Stubbornly once OSX decides you are a non localized app in English it never reconsiders.

Why do I share this interesting bit of trivia? Well it's a warning, I may at some point in the future drop German localization if it becomes too painful but in the meantime if you put "German" before "English" in your system preferences enjoy