But in fact to really make it work properly you also have to have it work with the metadata, the descriptive information about the movies: the titles, the synopsis that come back to the server. So what we end up actually doing is that we send a fake language code of EN-XA to our server and then that basically means that all responses are also pseudo-localized. And you can really see that it keeps you from drinking too much because if you come into the office in the morning and it looks like that just like: "Oh, f***. What did I do last night?" "No-no, it's ok.
It's pseudo-localization!". But it is important and this is kind of the difference between you know what we're able to do with taking it as a kind of a company-wide initiative. Otherwise you know if you don't happen to have... if you're not as big as an organization what I can tell you is that Xcode does allow you to pseudo-localize as well. And I highly recommend it for doing it. It's one of the best ways to be able to test how your app is going to behave in other languages. And there we go. All right okay now we understand what some of the problems are and I think that the first thing you have to do is use Auto layout. And I was kind of surprised because I've been developing with Apple technologies since it was next step. And so when Auto layout came out it made lots of sense to me and I know that there were a lot of developers a lot of people from other programming languages or environments on the team. And there was like: "Ah, Auto layout is a pain!". Yes, it is. Auto layout absolutely has been a pain in the ass. It's gotten better. But it's still a pain in... How do you say "ass" in Russian? There we go, what he said. Thank you. But the important thing is that whatever issues you may have for it, speed or whatever in some cases you're just kill yourself trying to do it especially when it has to do things with reversing the order of it. So it allows you to basically describe the behavior that you want. Where a lot of times for a button is I want the text label to go in the center and then I want there to be a border on the edges so no matter how much you have to expand make sure you have that. Even then though if you think back to the French example you're always going to have to make some compromises because you're trying to get a range. And so what ends up happening is that you have to have a relationship with the designers and start asking these questions from an early moment in the design saying: "Thank you. It looks great in English. What happens when the French get a hold of it?". So we've kind of trained ourselves as a practice to really think about that a lot. So I'm not going to go into how Auto layout works. That's for you to find out with... there's a million talks on WWDC about that but it's mostly a friendly reminder that you need to use it. Alright so pseudo-localization is one technique that we have. The other thing is dealing with human languages because as good as pseudo-localization is for as a technique sometimes you have to be able to deal with other languages and that's particularly because we do so many A/B tests right. And so in order to make it work what I ended up having to do as a developer I would maintain multiple user accounts in different languages. And you would have to log in and out of those. And it became incredibly tedious and as an engineer when something is tedious you try and figure out how to engineer a solution to it.
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