Week 79 - Translating the App

Here’s what I got up to last week.

Becoming a Xero App Partner

I had a look at building a Xero integration for Bank Statement Converter. I created an account, poked around and looked at the API documentation. It seemed like a feasible idea. Then I looked at the approval process. It seems like I would have to build a custom app for two customers, and then would be eligible to create an app store app that anyone could purchase.

Okay that’s a bit annoying. I do have plenty of customers who use Xero, getting two to build an integration for should be possible. Then I saw it takes around three months to get an app approved by Xero.

I contacted their support to see if this could be sped up, but the answer was no.

It still seems like something worth pursuing, but I’m not so keen on it at the moment since I won’t see results for multiple months.

Blog Translation

You may have noticed this blog has been translated into Chinese and Spanish. This is a Hugo blog, so all I needed to do was hire a translator and send them a bunch of markdown files. The Chinese and Spanish translations went live on September 15th. Has there been an increase in Chinese and Spanish users since then? Let’s crunch the numbers.

September 3rd to 14th

September 15th to 26th

Well the numbers went up, but the number of users is so small it might just be by chance. Let’s run this again next week and see what we get.

Japanese Translation

I hired someone to translate the blog into Japanese. They should be done by the end of the month

Translating the front end

Dom has returned to Bank Statement Converter and has been working on preparing the front end for translation.

We’re using i18NEXT, we need to isolate more strings and error messages from the backend. Once we’ve got all the strings we can hire translators. I’m hoping we can have one language complete by the end of this week.

Ignoring White Space Characters

I added in a check box to a behind-the-scenes UI that tells our engine to ignore white spaces characters for certain documents.

Most documents don’t have many white space characters, while other documents are filled with them. These characters confuse the hell out of the code that forms words from characters. To deal with this, for certain documents we ignore the white space characters and determine the words by the distance between characters. This has been helpful when supporting banks like the “Northfield Savings Bank”.

Fixed Customer Reported Problems

• Fixed a bug where some May Bank records weren’t being pulled in
• Fixed a bug where too much data was pulled in for Ford Loan documents

Ocean Park Waterworld

I went to Water World with some friends on Thursday. It was a nice day.

This Week’s Goal

1. Finish the front end translation for one language
2. Translate the blog into Japanese
3. Email 20 users

SEE YOU SPACE COWBOY