Yesterday morning the Indifex crew had a pleasant surprise when in the mail we saw a box with ‘USA' written on it. We hurried to open it, revealing a bunch of Moblin goodies including a few awesome T-shirts. Sweet!
It came from the Intel Open Source Technology Center, Portland, Oregon from the Moblin guys! Woohoo!
Moblin is an open source operating system with lots of visual effects and eye candy being developed by Intel and the Linux Foundation. The word “Moblin” comes from “Mobile Linux" and Moblin is indeed a Linux variant designed primarily for mobile devices such as netbooks, Mobile Internet Devices and In Vehicle Infotainment systems.
Basically, the Moblin project is practically an open source software development community aiming to deliver a platform and SDK mainly for devices based on the Intel Atom processor and other Intel Ultra-Mobile CPU architectures. Since the Intel Atom processor is targeted to small Internet-enabled devices, it gives people the ability to have all the power of a desktop pc in a small device in their backpack.
Here’s what Dell thinks of Moblin:
"Moblin is the next evolutionary step of the traditional Linux environment where focus on smaller devices and small screens is a requirement."
Experience it for yourself! Download the Moblin v2.1 Netbook images and take it for a test drive. View the user experience video, take a look at the screenshots, or view the preliminary user guide.
For a while now, the Moblin and Transifex teams have been working together to bring the Moblin experience to a much wider audience. Our purpose, of course, is to make it available in many languages, making it possible to reach places where English isn’t a native language, or not spoken at all! For devices using Moblin, the user experience is key, since it will be used by a wide audience in every day life — not just tech people or native English speakers.
So, what are we doing exactly?
Transifex is being used to translate Moblin in a variety of languages. Initially we bootstrapped the translations with a few internally developed ones, and then proceeded to open up the process and allow more people to contribute translations to their favorite platform. Since then, the participation from the community has been overwhelming. There are more than 300 translators working on translate.moblin.org, and the number of supported languanges increased from 10 to 25 and keeps growing, boosting Intel’s potential for translations.
Moblin 2.1 was officially shipped in the following languages: English, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, Swedish, Finnish, Korean, Japanese, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional. Additional languages are powered by the community itself via Transifex.
Here’s to wishing for double the languages in Moblin 3.0! =)
We know that a developer's role in the localization and translation management process can be a difficult one if you don't have the right workflows in place. To help, we've put together a guide highlighting the practices that the best development teams put into place to streamline the localization process — from integrating localization into build cycles to tricks for avoiding string freezes. Download the free guide to learn more.