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I had never really considered RTL design until I decided on a whim to support Arabic in an app [1], and before doing so I would have easily laughed at this. Aft

I had never really considered RTL design until I decided on a whim to support Arabic in an app [1], and before doing so I would have easily laughed at this. After doing so, I can completely understand it. It seems so simple—text just goes from right to left instead of left to right, but truly grokking that seems impossible for me. It's like riding a bike with the handlebars backwards [2]—it just doesn't work in your brain, as much as your higher-level thoughts seem to understand it. I was lucky that Flutter did almost all of the heavy lifting for me, but I spent more time than I'd like to admit ironing things out and I still don't think it's quite right. [1] https://github.com/hamaluik/timecop https://github.com/hamaluik/timecop [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI2aMKwXXnE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI2aMKwXXnE

MarcellusDrum 6y ago
First of all, thank you very much for translating the app to Arabic. There is a huge lack of good apps in Arabic. But I went to your website, timecop.app, and the Arabic is disastrous. Even the name of the app is translated wrong. I didn't download the app because it costs money and I don't really need it, but from what I saw (Name and feature list), the Arabic needs a lot of work.
- hamaluik 6y ago
  Thanks for checking it out! For the most part, the translations are all automatic via Google Translate—I only speak English and “cereal box French”. I know the quality of some translations are terrible, but for me it was more an exercise and learning experience in localization (for example I never would have learned about my inability to think in right-to-left had I not auto-translated to Arabic). The app hasn't made anywhere near enough money to warrant paying professional translators to translate things, but if you know anyone who wants to contribute, I'd happily take a pull request at [1]—I've already had people submit an Italian translation, and fixes for Russian and Japanese. [1] https://github.com/hamaluik/timecop https://github.com/hamaluik/timecop
hyperpape 6y ago
This is only tangentially related, but for some string handling code that needed to work on unicode, I wrote a property based test that used the Hebrew alphabet. Trying to reason about a failing test case using string indexes when the printed text is RTL was humbling.

MarcellusDrum 6y ago

First of all, thank you very much for translating the app to Arabic. There is a huge lack of good apps in Arabic. But I went to your website, timecop.app, and the Arabic is disastrous. Even the name of the app is translated wrong. I didn't download the app because it costs money and I don't really need it, but from what I saw (Name and feature list), the Arabic needs a lot of work.

hamaluik 6y ago
Thanks for checking it out! For the most part, the translations are all automatic via Google Translate—I only speak English and “cereal box French”. I know the quality of some translations are terrible, but for me it was more an exercise and learning experience in localization (for example I never would have learned about my inability to think in right-to-left had I not auto-translated to Arabic). The app hasn't made anywhere near enough money to warrant paying professional translators to translate things, but if you know anyone who wants to contribute, I'd happily take a pull request at [1]—I've already had people submit an Italian translation, and fixes for Russian and Japanese. [1] https://github.com/hamaluik/timecop https://github.com/hamaluik/timecop

hyperpape 6y ago

This is only tangentially related, but for some string handling code that needed to work on unicode, I wrote a property based test that used the Hebrew alphabet. Trying to reason about a failing test case using string indexes when the printed text is RTL was humbling.