RefreshingApps.com

This is one for the Flex developers in the house. Lupo is a fantastic AIR application focused on providing an easy mechanism for translating and localising Flex applications. Built by David Deraedt (http://www.dehats.com) who has a lot of experience in technical translations especially with Adobe technologies.

With lupo manager, an Adobe® AIR® application, easily extract strings from your source code, manage resource bundles and implement i18n logic in your Adobe Flex® / Adobe AIR applications, in a very productive way.

This is not a free application and costs a very reasonable 99€ for a single seat license. Lupo is really smart, it will parse you MXML and ActionScript and intelligently identify what it thinks is textual content that needs translating. This is usually text labels, form buttons items etc. You can also instruct Lupo to translate a specific item of text. Extracted text is held as a key value pair that is then held within a bundle. This bundle can then be exported or imported with a set of translations.

Lupo also guides the developer through the process of creating extra language locales from the Flex framework, Flex compiler build path alteration and offers the automatic insertion of MXML and AS for handling switching of translations.

Our beta testers, using early builds of the software, noted a productive boost which was about 40% to 75% percent. From my experience, the release version of Lupo should be closer to a productivity gain of 100%.

The process if relatively simple and if you are unsure there is some help docs on line and inline help bubbles on mouse over to guide you. Steps are divided between three main tabs in the work area, Source Extraction, Resource Bundles and Code Generation.

One thing I did get slightly stuck with was creating the Flex framework resource copy for the new translations. Following the help for Lupo I managed to create a new locale file in the Flex framework for my de_DE German translation.

Video review

Design eye

Clean look the green is not really to my taste in a UI although it’s on brand and has a nice logo icon that appears in my dock.

The UI is technical and does require an understanding of the task you are attempting to complete. David has helpfully done a video showing the workthrough of translating an example app that is worthy of a watch to get to grips with the product.

Technical eye

Built using Adobe Flex and the AIR framework.

In summary

If you are producing Flex content for multiple locales and need an agile friendly tool to assist with your translations Lupo is well worth a look.