Three things the mobile interface got wrong, all of them measurable.
The folder tree spent its width on depth. Four levels down, the 16px
indent steps and the 18px twisty left a folder 85px of a 300px drawer to
print its name in, and the twisty had walked far enough right that
hitting it was luck -- a miss landed on the row, which is a link, so the
wrong tap also cost a navigation. Under 768px the tree is now a
drill-down: one level at a time, no indent, a back row above it, and a
chevron at the right edge that is the same size in the same place on
every row. Tapping the row still opens the folder; only the chevron
changes what the list shows. The tree is untouched above 768px, where a
wide sidebar can afford the indent and where dragging a folder onto
another folder -- still the only way to reparent one -- needs both of
them on screen at once.
Every control in the top bar was under the 44px a fingertip covers: the
icons at 36, the search filter at 30, the row menu at 24, and the
hamburger 6px from the bezel in the corner a thumb is worst at. They
keep the size they draw at and gain a transparent hit area, since
growing the boxes would reflow a bar with no room to give; rows grow for
real, because a 44px target inside a 36px row reaches into its
neighbours. The one exception is the row menu, held to 36px wide: at a
full 44 it overlapped the drill chevron by 4px, so its right edge
silently drilled instead.
Pinch was dead on the message list. `.msg-row` sets `touch-action:
pan-y` to feed the swipe gesture the horizontal movement the browser is
not using -- but naming any value drops every gesture not named, zoom
included. It worked on an open message and died on the list, which reads
as the zoom being broken at random rather than as a rule about rows.
`pan-y pinch-zoom` keeps the swipe and gives the zoom back.
`i18n:coverage` reported 100% while a hundred-odd strings rendered
English in every language. It was not wrong about what it measured: it
reads JSX text, and none of these were JSX text. They were toast
arguments, `confirmDialog({ title, confirmLabel })` props, `title=` and
`aria-label=` attributes, and template literals — every one built from an
expression the codemod cannot read.
176 source strings and 15 plural sets now go through t() and plural(),
translated into all nine languages. Where English put a word in a slot,
the sentence is spelled out per branch instead: `Filter ${verb}` became
"Filter saved" and "Filter created", because which word agrees with what,
and where it sits, is not a property English gets to decide for everyone.
Counts that were `${n} message${n === 1 ? "" : "s"}` are plural() calls,
so Russian and Ukrainian get three forms and Japanese and Chinese get the
one they actually have.
Two of the catalogue's own conventions were worth learning the hard way.
Plural entries are keyed on the English *other* form, not `one` — `one`
is a form English happens to have and Japanese does not. And a constant
table holding English that is translated at the render site is fine: the
literal is a key, not a leak.
Which is what the new check encodes. `scripts/i18n-literals.mjs` accepts
a string that is wrapped where it is written or is a catalogue key
somewhere, and refuses one that is neither — a string no catalogue can
translate, however many languages ship. It found twenty more than my own
sweep had, including the stale-folder toast seen in production. It runs
as part of `npm run i18n:check`.
Also fixed: the catalogue is now awaited before the first paint. The
tree is rebuilt when a catalogue lands, so components recover on their
own, but a string computed in an effect does not — a toast fired in that
gap is emitted in English and stays English. The wait costs nothing
visible, since the session bootstrap already shows a spinner and English
resolves immediately.
And the Japanese agenda title loses a space Japanese does not use:
"{date} からの予定" was written with the English habit of spacing around
a placeholder.
Three places built user-visible English out of expressions rather than
writing it as JSX text, so the extraction codemod never found them and
they stayed English in all nine languages — including the five that have
been in production for weeks.
The calendar view switcher was the worst of them: it spelled its labels
as `v[0].toUpperCase() + v.slice(1)`, which is correct English and
untranslatable anywhere else. Day, Week, Month and Agenda were already in
every catalogue, sitting unused, because the buttons never asked for
them. They now come from a Record<View, () => string>, so TypeScript
makes the map exhaustive and adding a view forces adding its label. The
labels are functions rather than values: a module-level object would
capture whichever language happened to load first and keep it.
The other two needed new source strings, added to all nine catalogues:
the composer's title for an untitled draft ("New message"), its status
line ("Sending…", "Saving…", "Error", "Saved {when}", "Unsaved"), and the
agenda view's own title ("Agenda from {date}").
This is not the whole of it. A sweep for the same shape — template
literals, toast arguments, and dialog props rather than JSX text — turns
up roughly a hundred more strings, mostly toasts and confirmation
dialogs. Those are a second extraction pass rather than a fix, and are
left for one.
781 strings, machine-made and marked Beta, on the same terms as the
languages before it: the report link stands in for the native speaker we
do not have, and a missing entry falls back to English.
Plurals: there are none. Intl.PluralRules("ja") returns `other` for every
number, so each counted string carries one form. Counters do the work a
plural would — 通 for messages, 件 for conversations and items — which is
why "{n} messages" and "{n} conversations" are separate entries rather
than one pattern. The number alone does not decide the word after it.
Register is です・ます throughout, with the pronoun dropped: where English
says "your mailbox" this file usually just says メールボックス. Buttons
are the bare noun or verb stem — 送信, 返信, 削除 — not a sentence, which
is what every other mail client the reader has used does.
Script mixing is deliberate. Kanji for the noun carrying the meaning,
katakana for the loanword the reader already knows (メール, フォルダー,
アーカイブ), hiragana between them. Long vowels keep their ー.
Verified against the mock server: role folders localise and custom ones
are untouched, dates follow the language, and "{used} of {total}" comes
out reordered as "2.0 GB 中 700 MB" rather than word-for-word.
jcoffey-dev