Blog Splash

KO Approach Speaks Indonesian

by Kerido Friday, August 5, 2011 6:39 AM

We are happy to announce that KO Approach is now natively available in Indonesian. Here is how it looks:

Features page

Menus & Scrolling page

Contents page

The translation is available on the KO Approach download section.

We would like to thank our contributor, elda taluta, for the great work. And remember, should you wish to create your own translation, we will reward you with an Advanced license!

German Translation Updated

by Kerido Monday, October 11, 2010 7:26 AM

We have updated the German language file for KO Approach 0.5 Build 284. Again, thanks to our great contributor Jan Schröder for his thorough work!

KO Approach 0.4.5 Is Here

by Kerido Saturday, May 15, 2010 10:22 AM

It's been slightly more than a month since we released KO Approach version 0.4.4. Now we're excited to say that version 0.4.5 is here. We decided to publish updates more frequently in order to keep the users and the contributors in better sync with what we do at KO Software.

We should say that it is mostly a service release. One of the motives for it is that the previous version provides absolutely no support for right-to-left text direction. With this new version, the Hebrew language file is finally available for download. That means, thousands of users from Israel can now access Windows folders and files faster, in their mother tongue! I would like to thank Arik S. Petrov once again for his great work.

Regarding localization, I am hoping that a German language file is coming real soon now.

Another reason for this upgrade is the feedback we've been getting from some of our users who complain that there is no way to tell which plug-in is loaded in the unregistered mode. Well, we've added a new page to the Options dialog box. Hopefully, this should address the issue:

Plugins tab

With this page, unregistered users will have more control over which plug-ins are loaded. For example, if you do not need to preview text files and play back WAV sounds instantly, but do need to quickly preview graphics from KO Approach menus, you can disable InstantTxt.dll and InstantWave.dll so that Scope.dll will be loaded. In other words, you can tell KO Approach to load only those plug-ins that you need.

There are also some security updates in this release that improve the overall stability of the product. We highly encourage everybody to upgrade. Have fun using KO Approach!

Approach Masters Dutch

by Kerido Wednesday, May 5, 2010 8:05 AM

I would like to thank our new contributor, Orjan De Smet, for translating KO Approach to Dutch. Again, the way Approach looks in this new outfit is quite pleasing to the eye:

General tab

Behavior tab

Settings tab

Approach Can Speak Hebrew

by Kerido Monday, April 19, 2010 3:56 PM

I have a relative in Israel who kindly agreed to translate KO Approach into Hebrew. As a matter of fact, I was very suspicious whether Approach will be able to "speak" Hebrew without any code modifications. After all, lack of support for right-to-left text direction was for a long time stated under the Known Issues section of the Help Documentation.

With these thoughts in mind, I warned him that I would be constantly bugging him with various development materials as we would be proceeding. He promised to take it all stoically and provide corrections all the time. So here's the result.

First off, we added a new Metric to the language file. The Metric is responsible for text direction:

<Metric id="IDM_GLOBAL_LANGRTL" factor="1">1</Metric>

Second, I had to implement mirroring for dialogs and message boxes:

General tab

Behavior tab

Settings tab

As you may have noticed, we've removed the question mark from the title bar. The reason is that under the mirrored layout the question mark looked absolutely awkward:

Mirrored question mark

Also, the whole functionality behind the question mark is cumbersome from the usability standpoint. Given that the user is most likely pointing at a control whose meaning is unclear, he or she has to move the mouse away from the control, point at the question mark, click it, then point back at the initial control, and, finally click it again – too many mouse movements for such a simple operation! After all, Approach is about reducing the number of mouse movements and clicks to help you do your day-to-day tasks faster.

Glitching help popups

The previous screenshot illustrates another bug. The HTML Help popups that we were previously using, don't work quite well with the Hebrew language. This is why the whole popup functionality has been replaced by more convenient Tooltips.

Tooltips replacing HTML Help popups

In the meantime, we will publish an update to KO Approach where all these modifications are in effect.