Question

I’d like to give my users a warm welcome, when they are opening my application. So I want to have different sentences to show them randomly. The count of messages differs in each language.

What is the preferred way to solve this problem?

My ideas:

1. Save the count also in the strings file -> Don’t like this idea, because this must be maintained
   "welcomeCount" = "5";
"welcomeN" = "Hi....";

2. Seperating the messages -> Don’t like this idea, because you have to mind this
   "welcomeMessages" = "Hey there...|MessageN";

Anyone out there with an idea to solve this issue in a elegant manner?

Answer 1

You can store the welcome messages in localized property lists.

• In Xcode, go to File -> New -> File …
• Choose the Resource -> Property List template and for example “Welcome.plist” as file name.
• Select Welcome.plist in Xcode and change the type of the root object from Dictionary to Array.
• Select Welcome.plist, to go the File Inspector and click on “Make Localized …”. Then select the localizations that you want for the Welcome.plist., for example English and German.
• Now you have a Welcome.plist for each language which you can edit separately.
• To add strings, click on the “+” symbol in the property list.

In your program, you can load the list easily with

NSString *path = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"Welcome" ofType:@"plist"];
NSArray *messages = [NSArray arrayWithContentsOfFile:path];

This loads the “right” properly list, depending on the user’s language, into the array messages. You can choose a random message with

int idx = arc4random_uniform([messages count]);
NSString *msg = [messages objectAtIndex:idx];