John Topley’s Weblog

As part of my process of continuous and sometimes arduous improvement of my AssetsGraphed web application, I’ve recently added slightly better localisation support. Localisation—sometimes called L10n—in the context of software means adding special features for a specific locale. It usually follows internationalisation (i18n), which is the full-blown support of different languages and cultures.

AssetsGraphed isn’t currently internationalised, and unless there is suddenly a massive demand for it to be, I have no plans on changing this. So the user interface text will remain in English and read from left to right, as that’s what I know. I also know that proper internationalisation is a bit more involved than that! What I have changed however is how the display of currencies is handled. As you might imagine this is a fairly significant part of a financial asset tracking application.

AssetsGraphed has supported multiple currencies from day one and users can select which one they want to use on the Settings screen. The example below shows an extract from the Assets screen with the U.S. Dollar as the currency:

That’s all well and good, but it’s not always appropriate to prefix the amount with the currency symbol, and not all cultures group digits using a comma. In France for example, they use a period. ISO 31-0 mandates a space character. To accommodate all this, the digit grouping symbol is now a per-user setting and as the system administrator I can control whether the currency symbol is displayed before or after the amount. Here’s what it looks like with Swiss Francs:

I just noticed something that Flickr got exactly right—you don’t have to give photos a title. My process for using Flickr is usually:

1. Upload a batch of photos to my account, marked as private
2. Use the Organizr (did they drop that name?) to add the photos to a new set, or an existing one
3. Go through the new photos adding any individual tags as appropriate
4. Make the photos that aren’t really bad public and try to come up with a title

It’s that very last step that I find really increases the cognitive load; so much so that I often just give lots of photos the same title. I can’t quite bring myself to have public photos with titles like IMG_0970.JPG. I got to thinking that I never had to give physical photographs a title when I put them in an album, so why should Flickr make me do so? Then I tried it, found out that I don’t have to and smiled. Expect to see lots of anonymous photos in my Flickr photostream in future.

I booked some train tickets the other day using Qjump and was shocked by the colour choices in their user interface. They’re using some funky JavaScript in the text fields in the Quick Timetable section on the left of the page. It highlights the text you entered in light green on a white background! Check it out:

—I’d hate to see the clothes worn by whoever was responsible for that!