I expressed my hate towards localization in a previous post, and now I'm going further on the subject. I am now being forced to almost remove localization entirely, as it's simply not worth the effort. Two things this time:
Xcode corrupted my English strings file!!. I had to dig up an older version, and re-encode it using proper encoding.

I changed a LOT of NIBs recently. I am supposed to remake all of these new elements, and reconnect each outlet. What does this have to do with localization?

Here's what Apple needs to do. No multiple NIBs for multiple languages. They need to offer a tab in interface Builder, similar to the bindings tab, that allows you to change certain properties of an element to fit localization.

French?
- Change the title of this button to "Merci" and make it 10 pixels wider.
- Yes, please move the other buttons in proportion when resizing.

Obviously, this idea isn't perfect, and would need some tweaking for every situation. Apple simply needs to keep localization away from the actual outlet connections and bindings. It's really a mess right now, and I'm not sure if I'll be supporting multiple languages in the future until Apple does something about it.

In the mean time, Arizona Software has a very nice piece of software called iLocalize. This app allows you to change NIB strings without tinkering with the control positions or anything like that. Apple should've included something like this in the developer tools, but we can only hope that they'll do so in a future Mac OS X release...

A special thanks goes out to Readiris, a piece of OCR software, that saved this blog post (quickly) because I was dumb enough to try and open a 7MB file with SubEthaEdit. :)