Mobile devices and tablets present unique challenges to developers, especially when dealing with globalization issues. Learn from Globalization Guru Edwin Hoogerbeets as he shares his insight on:
- Dealing with screen-size issues like truncation and wrapping
- How landscape and portrait modes differ
- Name & phone number formatting
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Transcription
We’re here with Edwin Hoogerbeets, who is going to tell us about tablet globalization. Edwin, if you would give us some things that are special to tablets, phones and mobile devices in general in terms of globalization issues.
One of the biggest issues is of course the side of the screen. Especially with the phones, which are very small. So, you get truncations all of the time and even if you don’t get truncations, sometimes you get wrapping. So that pushes the rest of the line off of the screen when the translation is much longer than the English. You still get another problem when it works in landscape mode and you turn it to portrait, which is much narrower, so you get truncations again.
People use mobile devices as a contact manager. So all of those international functions that are used in contacts. For example, name parsing and formatting, phone number parsing and formatting, address parsing and formatting are all much more important than with a laptop.
Can I get your general thoughts on the conference today? It was a full day of good networking and a lot of good information shared.
It was a lot of interesting things that I learned. The LinkedIn presentation was interesting. The idea of shipping the localizations & features independent of each other so that they are not a bottleneck to shipping English. For many years, we worked to make internationalization a bottleneck to force the core team to do it. Now, we’re going the other way. We’re making it independent again, because on the web, you can ship something a week later.
Thank You Edwin!
