~robcee/ more than just sandwiches

Workspace [fixed-in-devtools][l10n?]

Good news, everyone! This morning we landed the Workspace feature in our devtools project repository. This is exciting stuff for practitioners of JavaScript and we’ll have more to write about it very soon. hint, it’s probably a lot simpler and more powerful than you think it is. Many thanks to Mihai Sucan for taking the add-on and making it a feature. Also, special thanks to Erik Vold for his contributions to the add-on. You’re in the Firefox source code now!

All is not unicorns and puppies though: there has been some concern expressed over the name of this feature. On the one hand, it might not easily convey what this thing does. A lot of things come to mind when I hear the term “workspace” used in a compu-technological context. Were it not for my years as a Smalltalker, I’d think “window manager” and it is most-definitely not that.

The other, more important issue is, how will this localize? Axel, aka Pike, aka :l10n expressed some concern over the word. To get some feedback, I’ve written a post in mozilla.dev.l10n asking for help making Workspace internationalizable. Take a read, and drop a note in there if you have any suggestions.

I’m sure I’ve seen the word ‘scratchpad’ used for that kind of interactive, exploratory environment, although I don’t seem to have a citation handy.

I know I’ve used similar terms to scratchpad to try to describe it to people before. “Scratchpad”, “Stickies”, … seem like another good analogue for what they are. Not sure if those would be more or less localizeable than “Workspace” or not.

Thanks for the comment!