[squeak-dev] [Krestianstvo] CameraPlugin and general accessibility

Hans-Martin Mosner hmm at heeg.de
Mon Nov 1 09:33:50 UTC 2010


For the last couple of days I've been experimenting with the
Krestianstvo image and I'm really impressed!

Here's one nit that I found while trying out the camera functionality:
On Linux, the method CameraPlugin class>>loadPluginResourcesOnX
downloads the camera plugin but saves it under the name
'so.CameraPlugin'. However, the VM will not load it under this name (as
it is looking for 'CamerPlugin'). This should be fixed. After manually
renaming the plugin, the camera functionality works really nice!

And then there's the general accessibility problem: I (as many others)
don't speak russian. I can barely remember the phonetic equivalent of a
number of cyrillic letters, so at least I can transliterate some words,
but the meaning escapes me.
For UI labels, that would not be a big problem, but reading code and
trying to modify it becomes enormously difficult if you don't understand
the words...
There is a technical problem hidden which makes language switching even
more complicated: Krestianstvo uses cyrillic letters for some file
names, and that breaks as soon as you switch the locale to 'en' where a
Latin1 environment is assumed. This is not really Krestianstvo's fault,
as the filename encoding should actually be platform and filesystem
dependent, not locale dependent.

I fear that this is a big hurdle for adopting Nikolay's impressive work
and experimenting with it.
However, I have no idea how this could be fixed (without investing quite
a bit of time, which I can't offer at the moment).

Cheers,
Hans-Martin



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