Using Vernacular

rrodriguez

Hello,

I'm starting a project that contains an iOS and Android apps. These apps should be properly localized and we have chosen Vernacular to achieve this localization.

General question:

1) Is there any other cross-platform method/framework out there? I had been playing around with Vernacular for less than a day, and even when it seems cool and promises to work fine, it lacks documentation and examples out there.

Vernacular specific:

1) How do you add vernacular to your project? I'm working on the iOS portion and -after compiling vernacular solution- I could add Vernacular.Catalog.dll as a reference to both my Core and iOS applications. Is this the right way to do it? I would love to see a vernacular component.

2) Can I run vernacular in a mac? I haven't found how (I'm a newbie mac user). I could run it on my pc only.

Thanks,
R.

DanBelcher

Rasiel-

Re: your Vernacular specific questions...

1) Yes, you simply add the .NET Vernacular.Catalog.dll as a Reference in your project. Ofcourse, you'll need to make sure that you are
using Vernacular;
in the project. You will then need to call the platform-specific catalog implementation:

            Catalog.Implementation  =   new ResourceCatalog {
                GetResourceById =   id  =>  {
                    var resource    =
                        NSBundle.MainBundle.LocalizedString(id, null);
                    return  resource    ==  id  ?   null    :   resource;
                },
            };

For iOS, this will likely happen the the FinishedLaunching method of your AppDelegate. Now you can call Vernacular.Catalog.GetString("YourString", "YourComment");

2) I'm running Vernacular on Mac OS X without issue. You'll need to rename Vernacular.exe to vernacular and make sure you have proper permissions to run it (sudo chmod a+x vernacular). You will likely also want to add it your .bash_profile PATH and write shell scripts or msbuild scripts to automate the process, but it works great when you get things setup.

GuillermoGutierrez

I'm using localization in the PCL project using .resx files. I've been working this way several months and it's pretty easy and completely cross-platform. One single localization file for all the platforms.

Check out this tutorial for more info. I've tweaked this solution a little, but it worked out of the box pretty well.

rrodriguez

@danb thanks for your response. I ended up using Vernacular and I forgot to post the results back here (my bad, somehow this thread was never replied and I forgot about it).

rrodriguez

@GuillermoGutierrez I remember seeing the satellite assembly support but I gave it a tried and never made it to work. (Never found pointers as the blog post you included here though).

I have a 2 level PCL in my app, one PCL which is used not only by my mobile apps, but also by the web app, in that PCL I put .resx resources I intended to use everywhere, however I could never use them in iOS. I will give it another try.

While investigating on Vernacular, I learned that .resx are very limited, things like gender and plurals are not supported naturally.

It is not fun to have 2 sets of resources, and a lot of duplicates as I have now between my .resx and Vernacular, but I haven't found the time to clean this mess as focused as I'm in new features.