Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Language Issues

Upon releasing the last update to support Taiwanese servers, a comment left brought an issue to my attention: language issues. The user's comment was that while the app supports Taiwanese servers, there is no way to input (or use the app, for that matter), Chinese characters. This is obviously an issue for those who use the app and do not use English. In trying to solve the issue at hand I ran into a few problems:

1. The app itself isn't localized into any other languages. This is something that I can fix to a certain degree. For example, the label text I use for "Region" and the buttons could be localized easily. However, the realm names, cannot.

2. The data feed that Blizzard gives for the Taiwanese servers is in English. Check it out for yourself if you don't believe me: http://tw.battle.net/api/wow/realm/status. That link is the API that Blizzard has released for developers to use. As you can see, all the realms are in English.

The only option I see right now is to manually translate all the names. This is an issue because for phones that don't have the Chinese character set would most likely see a bunch of garbage when trying to view the status (albeit people outside of Taiwan probably don't have accounts in Taiwan, but I digress). I'm trying to see if there's a more elegant way to get the realm status from the API pre-translated, but it may take some time.

Monday, July 11, 2011

New Update (1.07b)

Just popped in to add a quick update. I just release the newest version of the WoW Realm Status app.

Updates:
- Added support for Taiwanese realms
- Fixed a force close error with notifications

For some reason, even though my developer pane contains the newest version, the marketplace doesn't seem to have updated with the latest version. It's odd because usually the update is instantaneous...but we'll see. It hopefully should be available soon.