November 2016 – MiniTPMS Begins

Cue Hans Zimmer's Batman anthem, because Yes, this title is a spin-off of the Batman Begins movie title. Maybe because I love Christian Bale (as an actor, of course), or Christopher Nolan (as a Director), or Batman (as Batman)... anyway, enough about Bob Kane's character. 

Let's dive into the current state of our progress with MiniTPMS in November 2016:

There are big plans for this little thing of ours, and we have put them in couple of modules (this can change in the future, as everything changes, of course): 

Note that some of these screenshots are just "rough plans" not final ones, they will be changed to serve our purposes better. Some of the fields will also be moved to next screens. 

​Any-wow, in November we have mostly been working on Project Entry, and here how it looks like so far. 

Enter New Project - Overview 

The point of this screen is to set up the "basics" only once, this is the TLC (your "actual" Customer) the "End Client" and the "Component Root" (the naming might change in the final version, the point is a combined descriptor of a biggish project). 

See that project Members field? We can (but don't need to) fill it with people who are involved:

There is a huge possibility that the actual "Components" part of this overview page will go to a next screen, for simplicity and "more clean" look.

So it will look something similar to this:​

Note the awesome Workflow field that I have not commented. This is a pulldown list of workflow tasks, which is awesome if you are not only working in the "translation" or "TEP" systems, but have something more complex or different. We'll get to that too.

​Right now, I am thinking "Why is source language not a button like the Target languages?" - I just informed our development, to maybe take it into consideration. Do you have something to add? We listen. Put it in the comments... 

Anyway, how about if the source language is NOT in the current list?

No problem at all, just click the "Other languages" button and it will show other languages as well.

Prioritizing the languages you used to work with (but are not on the list), and putting the rest behind them.

Just tell me how awesome is that?

Oh, and, please ignore the text errors, developers are not linguists ;)​

What about comments? You can mark them important to show them in the right part of the screen to be found easier. Also, sorry for the bad lingo, but our developers are hooked on Breaking Bad (I'm thinking about watching it again too 🙂 )

So now we're almost there, fillin' a in the things (please don't get scared, once you get used to this + we create a "turbo" version it really will be set up in a blink of an eye), just the Client and Vendor volumes remains:​

For each language here you can see the "machinery". The names of translators appointed, their word counts, due dates, etc. Same for Editors and in this case Reviewers. The numbers in brackets show the number of open tasks in each workflow step. Of course, your Workflow might look differently...

You have another task to add for this (pre-populated) Workflow because Client asked you to do a DTP as well? No problem. Click on the + button and add DTP task to workflow either for just one, or for all languages. And then you'll be able to pick the step where it should be placed (it might not be the last, maybe it's the 2nd).

These kind of things really make me want to cry because of how happy I am.​

We are also implementing all kinds of visual notifications (read: colors) for different statuses etc, but they are just not shown at the moment. ​

And among the future awesome functions, we have planned a part where we will be able to import the file list you get from your LSP, along with the word-counts, and then you can decide which vendor translates which one. So the "warning" of over-outsourcing will be (possibly) obsolete.

Moving on.​

Remember my mail about Vendor ratings? They will be shown when you pull down a list of vendors you want to use for your project (this is not the final version, but you get the idea) :​

Now that we have established how utterly complicated this is, first of all: it's not. ​Second: there's gonna be them templates that you can use which will minimize project entry time to non existent (ok, let's just agree that it will be Fast).

Stay tuned.​

What will happen in December?

​What will happen in the future? 

​Good thing is, if there is more people interested in this, and chippin' in, we might be able to speed up the process of implementation. Like, speed it up a lot!

If you want to speed it up, clicky-clicky here:

Special Early Adopters Sale​

And of course, if there's something you might want to add here, don't spare us. Tell us how it is, aka Leave a Comment!