The Germans are coming!

Alternate title: Get local, stupid

A very nice customer named Nico emailed me a few weeks ago to ask if it would be possible to get Randominion translated into German. While localizing my apps into as many languages as possible would be great, I am a stupid American who only speaks English so I'd have to pay someone a lot of money to do the translations.

Fortunately for my German customers though, Nico is such a nice guy that he offered to do all the translating for free. So he and I have been working together to get Randominion up and running in another language.

However, as the old saying goes, it's only the second language that's hard, the rest are practically free. This is not an old saying, but rather one I just made up. It still applies though, because when I was first writing the app the idea of having it translated never even crossed my mind so I didn't code for it from the outset.

This is a mistake I shall never make again. It's clear to me now that it would have been much easier if I had been writing this way all along as opposed to trying to refactor later. I'm nearly done though, and the updated app should be on the story in the first few days of 2013 (iTunes Connect has a nasty habit of closing for the holidays, the nerve). I'm also hopeful that other people will come forward and offer to translate the app into their native languages as well, because now that it's ready to be translated it's really quite easy.

So if you're a programmer and you're reading this do yourself a favor, make your apps localization friendly from the outset, because sooner or later (maybe not even for the current app you're working on), you're going to need something translating and you'll be so glad you're ready.