Currently our translations are working through Pootle. However with the abandoning of that project and the remaining bugs, we have decided to implement our own bespoke translation app, which we call Bilara. It’s currently under heavy development. @blake is building it, and I am designing the UI.
My thoughts on UI are heavily influenced, of course, by the way that I work, and my experience on Pootle. I spent basically two years with it every day.
I much prefer a very simple and clean interface, and find much of the information presented to a user on Pootle to be useless if not downright distracting. So over time I developed my own modifications to the pootle interface, mostly consisting in taking things away. I have further developed these based on thoughts for Bilara. Now I have what works for me as a much nicer UI.
My design for Bilara will be based on this. My detailed proposal is here:
But of course, different people work in different ways and have different preferences. So I thought I’d see if any of our volunteers who are working on pootle would like to try out my modifications and give feedback. That way I can try to shape the design of Bilara to better serve the users.
To use this modified version, you need to first install the “Stylus” plugin for Firefox or Chrome. (Be sure to avoid the similar “Stylish”, which has been caught stealing user data!) Then create a style for the url pootle.suttacentral.net, and paste this CSS code in there.
https://github.com/suttacentral/suttacentral/files/2301891/pootle-bilara-skin.zip
Et voila! It looks very different!
This approach uses CSS to style everything, and it is bad! Many things are outrageous hacks and code perversions of the most disgusting kind. Never mind, it’s only for messing around!
Not everything works perfectly, although I have been using it regularly for some time. The goal is not to fix the Pootle skin, but to see what is useful and pleasant for translators when building Bilara.
One detail: the color scheme is Solarized, which is quite low contrast. I like it, but it will be best as an option, as it is not very suitable for people whose vision is not good.