First note : not sure this is the better forum to post in, so feel free to move my message.
Second note : please excuse my english (damn frenchs people, always sleeping in english courses )
Hello world,
I'm Pierre-Yves, from Framakey Community.
Shortly, Framakey is a french-only "clone" or "fork" of portableApps. We used to (and still use) some PA launcher code (thanks again to all team !), but we launche in summer 2005 our own PAM (called Framakiosk, and based on a modified Firefox profile). Framakey pack has been downloaded officialy > 500 000 times, but officiously more than 3 000 000 times (thanks to some City Halls that distribute freely more than 200 000 Framakeys each year freely to students for a couple of years). Our support forum has more than 13 000 msg.
That's quite a success, and we always credits PA.com (and especially John) for that.
Today, I had a conversation with MarkoMLM : https://portableapps.com/node/16395#comment-101840
about OOo Portable in french. I recommend you reading this posts before continnuing.
Done ? Thanks
Today, PA.com is not very suitable for french (and maybe other foreign) users, mostly because the main language used is english (please don't laugh at me, imagine that your aunt Jackie must read download softwares on Turkish websites).
The other reason is that our own PAM (Framakiosk) was really easy to use (but less to adapt, even with HTML and CSS only) to newbies.
So I have some questions (maybe answered elsewhere, but didn't found despite my searches) :
- Does PA.com team displays some rules (or forums) for foreign users ?
- how does the translation process work ?
- do you have plans to have part of website in foreign language ? Do you mind if other countries make "forks" - of course GPL and conserving credits to PA.com - with their own specificities (that's not all about language, but also culture and habits) ?
- do you specificaly need help for french ?
That's for the questions around localized (agin, not only "translated") versions.
Now, about PAM.
- what's the roadmap for PAM (I saw PAM Mod, but it's unofficial and quite instable for me) ?
- do you have plans to automate the process of finding and downloading apps (like in Synaptic or adept package manager, see post above) ?
- does anybody working on it ?
- are you interested in ?
The point is : I, as framakey maintainer, would be happy to help and participate. But language is quite a wall between us (or mostly between our users), maybe we could bring something into PA.com (as we do in example with "Cafe" application, wich was a framakey apps before becoming "Expresso", with translation and testings, etc). And PA.com accept with benevolence that some foreign forks lives on their own.
Not sure how it could work (or if it could) but the most beautifull thing with open-source is that anybody is free to work on his own idea of what's the best fit for his users.
So I open the door and wait to see if someone is interested...
Thanks for reading
PY