Coders 4 Africa

Will Mutua at Afrinnovator writes an interesting article on how to design websites for the African market and supports it with some facts on the ground. Looking at the examples of the most successful websites in Kenya and Nigeria, Will comes down with the following nuggets when it comes to designing for the African market: ..

It turns out localization is not such an obvious task. I am currently trying to localize my Nouchi.Mobi app built with CakePHP and although CakePHP i18n console shell is helpful in created POT files, there still remains the question of translating time strings in French when using for example the CakePHP timeAgoInWords() or the PHP strftime() functions . I found a good tutorial on getting it set up in your environment here. Luckily I develop on Linux so i was able to find the LC_TIME files and import them in my application. Another tip i found out was also running the i18n shell task on your CAKE_CORE folder. It will create a POT file for your views, and your helpers as well which will give youaccess to some of the hard coded strings like month and day of the week values.

It’s kind of interesting, and not frequent to have a mini-scandal going in the African technology scene and the latest one involves Mocality, a Kenyan mobile business directory startup and contractors/employees (???) of Google Africathat used Mocality’s client call list and misrepresented themselves as working with Mocality in order to in fact, steal customers away from them. According to Mashable:

During the development of Nouchi.Mobi where i use this quite useful Facebook plugin (get it, it’s the best!), i ran into an issue trying to authenticate my localhost server against my Facebook app settings.

Moving from Subversion to Git can be hard and i ran into an issue trying to resolve conflicts in a file that was different in the two branches I work on. Since I am working on a Mac, with OSX Lion, i found these two articles to be quite useful:

Le temps de chargement d’une page est un facteur important dans l’évaluation des performances d’un site Web. Il a un impact non négligeable sur l’expérience utilisateur et même sur le référencement naturel. Plusieurs techniques peuvent être utilisées pour optimiser les performances d’une application Web (mise en cache, compression des fichiers, minification, etc)...

Herman Chinery-Hesse is Ghanian and runsSOFTtribe, one of Africa’s largest software companies, and he is not a happy camper. In a must read interview with Kernel Mag if you are interested in African software, he details the woes that his business is facing in winning government contracts. Highlights:

Doing some local development with Titanium and I noticed that when using the xhr object to hit my localhost server (idxdot.dev), and testing using the emulator, I got this error:

Slowly but surely, West African countries are following the lead set in East Africa in pushing E-Government. In Ivory Coast, a seminar was held last week (December 14th to the 18th 2011) on the topic of e-government moderated by Mr Georges M’bra, of the government’s scientific committee. ...