I find that the French messages are still, to a large degree, in English.
 
Does anyone have a complete French translation to share before I go laboriously translating in my best French?
 
Chris

Non ici

Merci de votre réponse Ned

Hi! I think that Viart should pay a professional French translator to do that job correctly. So everyone can benefit of it.
 
If you do the translation yourself, you will not be able to get future updates or upgrades because you may and probably will overwrite your resource pages. Otherwise you will miss all new fields. Maintenance will not be easy.
 
Anyway I think this viart responsibility.

I don't think it's Viarts responsibility to provide language translations. They already provide a lot for my money.
 
I have no problem doing my own translation - just wondered whether anyone had already done it.
 
I take your point about upgrading and until Viart has a simple solution I shall just have to compare the current and new French files before upgrading

I partially agree with you Chris, but a central pool would be good to prevent repetitive work for users so perhaps ViArt should provide an incentive for contributions as the 26 languages offered at present would take a lot of internal work or organisation by ViArt to keep up-to-date?
 
I'll have more of a think about the "simple solution" as I've had couple of ideas since 3.5 came out.

Hi Ned
 
Someone recently suggested there should be a wiki to enable users to share with understanding and using Viart.
 
In the lack of a serious manual update and my desperate need to get the best from this excellent software I have been contemplating putting one on my server with the idea that regular contributors here could use it.
 
It would also enable us to add things like language files.
 
It is not something to take on lightly and I would not want to control it - except for access for security reasons, and to restrict to Viart users.
 
Your views?
 
CHRIS

Im in favour of a Wiki, an excellent idea but ViArt should host it because a) its work for you and b) they have a better technical understanding than all of us of the software and thus can vet more fully any contributions and c) the information stays with the product.
 
However I think this issue goes deeper in that the ViArt evolution strategy seems to be worked out well on a technical side but the marketing and presentation leaves a lot to be desired - for example the demo shop - the "shop window" for new customers - is only version 3.0!
 
I get the impression that there are a lot of enthusiastic and experienced users but the ViArt team doesn't seem to want to tap the potential - or has a very high workload elsewhere. The Wiki idea was raised in mid April and, as a lot of the contributions to the Features Requests, has had little feedback onto the forum from support to show users that they are listening.
 
Dont get me wrong this is not a "whinge" I think its a serious piece of software with great potential.
I contribute, I hope, the constructive criticism that with an excellent product good marketing has a close importance to good programming.

Well, you make good points.
 
My frustration is that despite appeals for a comprehensive manual little happens; could be that product development and support take all their resources.
 
If it were for Viart to host a wiki they would either have done it or progressed the manual.
 
I don't want to spend much time on a wiki other than host and make some contributions. There are a number of good people like you who could add material.
 
The fact is I, for one, need a good point of reference - I sometimes want to do something I remember seeing in the forum at some time and cannot find it. With a wiki we would record everything in a practical and accessible way.
 
But I would not bother unless:
a: enough people are enthusiastic to contribute
b: Viart puts up a link as they do for Hollyland - which would be important to get their endorsement and, hopefully, involvement. Perhaps they would put their manual there
- maybe take it over if it works.
 
Perhaps this is an idea that will disappear like many others.
 
Chris

Ideally the manual should be the wiki? Effort then put into it would be in the same direction from both ViArt and users.

Back to the french issue, Christopher, have you approached Viart about providing the french translation to them for free in exchange for something of value to you (like some free Premium support, perhaps?) One of my clients provided a foreign language translation for another cart and negotiated a lower price for the software in exchange.

the manual should be the wiki
 
Yes, Ned, but it isn't and little has developed with the manual for as long as I have been using Viart, so I don't expect it will.
 
Viart about providing the french translation
 
There is a French translation, dmaui, but not complete; I did this over the week end. I do actually speak reasonable French so in just got on with it
 

Documentation is always hard for small companies, particularly those who are mostly techie. Cool software will get you a small loyal group of customers. Documentation and developer info is needed to get past that.
 
Perhaps the wiki is a win-win. Viart users get a huge benefit as documentation becomes available, Viart gets a resource lift and some new customers (ones that cannot work without docs). It's likely to proceed faster is it's done outside Viart, it also puts the work product into the hands of the wiki contributors.

Thank you wazoodle - just need a bit more positive fed back to warrant putting in the effort.