Now, the problem with doing your own multilingual code is: you need to “fix” things which are designed to work with the “normal” way of doing things. A case in point: menus. Since I was doing my own on-the-fly translations, I needed to update menus on-the-fly too.

Now, Apple’s menu coding is confused. Or, rather, it confuses me deeply. I’m a simple sort of fellow, so when I see NSMenu and NSMenuItem, I wonder: are they views/windows/abstract? Why do they both have title properties? If I can set the title, why doesn’t it always reflect that on screen?

Of course, I can get them working, but IMHO it’s not intuitive. It’s the Item that has a title which I can edit – unless it’s an item along the top of the screen, then it’s another Item’s submenu, which is a Menu. Not at all confusing.

The other problem is that, if you want to update a menu, you can’t do that when you need to, i.e. when the menu sends you an Action. So, if I have a menu to change a display language to German, I can’t set the title of menu-items to their German equivalents straight away – but 20ms later is fine.

The 20ms-later trick is also good for adding emojis to menus. If you don’t do that, the emoji doesn’t get displayed. Is that really by design?

So, this sort of confusion is not good for a Friday, and that’s where Day 3 went. Along with researching which English words should be translated and which shouldn’t. For example, “Quit” doesn’t seem to be translated in other apps but “Window” does. This is why English is the easiest language to learn, because of all the English words that lazy gits/sheep like me couldn’t be bothered to translate…