Internationalize Your iOS Apps for a Global Audience
Sixty percent of iPhone users worldwide aren’t native English speakers, half of the Top 10 iOS app markets are non-English speaking, and app revenue in Asia is soaring while North American growth is flattening. Internationalizing your apps will make your worldwide customer base happy and give you a powerful competitive advantage in the global marketplace. Now, iOS expert Shawn Larson brings together all the knowledge you need to do it.
Larson takes information previously scattered across dozens of blog posts, tutorials, and book chapters and integrates it into one easy-to-navigate resource. He presents step-by-step coverage and practical code for controlling international settings, character encoding, locale and localization, UI adjustments, App Store customizations, and more. You’ll find a sample project in every chapter—including a major three-chapter project guiding you through several key stages of app internationalization.
Coverage includes:
- Customizing language, region, and locale settings, including date, time, currency, quotation marks, separators, and more
- Working with character sets, including Unicode and ligatures
- Coding for locale with NSLocale and locale-specific arguments
- Systematically prepping your app for localization
- Leveraging the full power of base localization
- Generating dot-strings files and working with their key-value pairs
- Localizing images and app names
- Effectively using translation services—and avoiding the pitfalls
- Adjusting your UI to avoid clipped strings in longer languages
- Using constraint settings to support right-to-left languages
- Specifying App Store supported territories and pricing tiers
- Localizing your App Store summary page: name, descriptions, keywords, URLs, screenshots, and EULAs
If you're an experienced Objective-C developer, iOS Internationalization will help you expand your iOS market worldwide and capture opportunities that would otherwise be far beyond your grasp.
All sample code and completed projects may be downloaded at github.com/ShawnLa-i18n.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Reader Expectations
How This Book Is Organized
Getting the Sample Code
Contacting the Author
1 International Settings
System Settings: International
Language
Voice Control
Keyboards
Calendars
Region Format
Representing Dates
Long Versus Short Date Formats
Representing Time
Telephone
Currency
Sorting
Measurements System
Decimal and Thousands Separators
Quotation Marks
Other Callouts
Summary
2 Characters and Encoding
Characters
Strings
Code Pages and Encoding
Unicode and Encoding
Encoding in Action
Coding Encoding
Objective-C Encoding Enumerations
Encoding Gone Bad
Diacritics
Surrogate Characters
Retrieving Characters from Unicode Code Points
Obtaining Unicode Code Points
Glyphs
Summary
3 Coding for Locale
NSLocale Class
Address Book Framework
NSNumberFormatter
NSDate
NSDateFormatter
NSCalendar
NSDateComponents
NSTimeZone
NSString
Summary
4 Prepping Your App for Localization
Building an International Exerciser
App Creation Overview
Home Screen
Measurement System
Quotes and Scripts
Calendar and Date Components
Date Formatting
Number Formatting
Contact Names/Address Book Framework
Strings
Other Locale-Specific Topics
Summary
5 Localizing Your App
Localization
Localizing a View Controller from the Sample App
Running Under the Localized Language
Working with Localized Images
Localizing App Icon Name
Other NSLocalizedString Macros
Creating a Generalized Key Name
genstrings Tools
Translating to Localized Languages
Word Order
Plural Forms and the CLDR
Summary
6 Adjusting the UI
Auto Layout and Constraints
Tools and Testing
UI Localization
Summary
7 Submitting Your App
App Submission Requirements
App Store Details
Localizing iTunes Connect Data
Apple Promotional Materials
Summary
A Case Study: Boom Beach
B Web Resources
About the Author :
Shawn E. Larson is a graduate of the University of Idaho and has more than 20 years of experience in the software industry. As a member of the Microsoft Office engineering team, he contributed to Mac Office and Office for the iPad development. His day jobs now are as an iOS dev for Nordstrom and an instructor for the iOS certification program at the University of Washington. In his off time, Shawn enjoys all things geeky and gadgety, the outdoors, and his wife’s Zumba class. Shawn and Amy have been married for more than 20 years and have two children, Lindsey and Michael.
