In this blog post, I will write about my experiences with Google Summer of Code during the first half of the program. For my first couple weeks of experiences, I wrote a blog post here.

Week 3

During the third week, I mainly focused on finishing up previously started pull requests and issues. I mainly focused on localization and set up all strings we need with explanations in Weblate to prepare them for localization work. Furthermore, I also did the German localization myself, since I am a native speaker.

I then moved on to mainly work on the next main part of my internship. The second focus of Scribe iOS was to be able to select which language you use to translate from.

To explain: The custom keyboard has a function that lets you translate a word from English to the keyboard's language, intended for language learners. The problem here is that there are people who don't speak English or would rather use a different language to translate from, e.g. if it's more linguistically related to the target language.

This, however, I had quite a few issues with, not being able to create a working version no matter which approach I tried.

Week 4

For this reason, I had a call with two of my mentors, Andrew and Henrik, to help me with creating an approach to this issue. We split the issue into multiple facets, to plan out the development further. It helped me to take an approach and gave me more confidence for this task, and I started work right away.

I also did some minor fixes to bugs in previous commits, which had shown themselves when I tried to use the new features for this issue.

Week 5

In this week, I finally finished part of the work on the language switcher feature by creating a design for the setting to choose a translation language. I learned a lot about storyboard and .xib files in Swift, which are used to display a specific design in an app. I created the base structure for the setting and worked on more button designs needed for this feature.

Next Weeks

The couple of weeks after, I did not work much on the project, since I agreed with my mentors to focus on studying for exams instead of the internship.

Conclusion

Even though work slowed down after the first few weeks, I was able to continue with work because I asked my mentors for help, even if I was a bit hesitant. I am glad I pulled myself together in the end and feel more confident about the coming work as a result. I look forward to working with my mentors in the coming weeks to finish this project with satisfactory results.

GSoC 2024 Midterm Report