There are millions and millions of people at that side of the world, wouldn’t it be worth considering actively trying to get coders for synfig from there?
Perhaps try and market Synfig on various asian graphics forums, Maybe try and get translators for different asian languages now that we have the new online translation service? etc.
jcome, you are from China, right? How do we involve your fellow citizens, and other asians, in Synfig?
Sounds good for me. Yes I am living in China, currently in Shanghai City.
Regarding spreading the Synfig in China (or Asia), I have rough thinkings in my mind. The localized app and doc is important for Chinese arts somehow. So the first thing, to translate doc/tut as much as possible, as soon as possible. For the synfig itself, now zh_CN version is available in git, but polish job is still needed. I still waiting for a localize-able Windows version before I start spread it in local art forums.
my short to-do list:
01, polish zh_CN.po files
02, review docs translated into simplified Chinese
03, translate more docs
04, try to get some C++ knowledge
05, try to fill out the lacking icons
06, wait the pdf manual release and translate it into simplified Chinese
07, write a series articles of synf studio in simplified Chinese, and post them in some of famous geek-oriented forums
08, then start to spread in art forums especially animation forums.
09, get involved a bit more in synfig development.
10, more …
ok, I forget the most important thing that is to be an advanced synfig studio user
I don’t mean to sound cynical, but open source is pretty much a product of an affluent society… it’s true that there are lots of people in China, but finding people with time and energy to spare on writing computer code is rare as rockinghorse poo. In Beijing, someone with an 11 hour a day job with 6 hours of commuting could be considered lucky. Not to mention, it’s fairly unusual to find people who speak English (which you kinda need for code comments and so on)
I taught Blender in a uni in Beijing for 6 months, and out of about 40 students, two of them showed any appreciation for what open source meant - one guy, completely bemused, even asked me why foreigners do these things - you can see how survival in a third world country requires/creates a different world view. They were much more interested in learning maya, to them it was more functionality and more job prospects for the same price (ha)
Open source does have a following in China - I’ve even met some of them, though it was pretty hard to find them
Nice idea! Unfortunately Open Source doesn’t have a following here in India. For all I know, I’m the only Indian ever to have used Synfig. Thus the responsibility falls on me that I make a decent movie with it and show off, crediting Synfig as one of the major tools in studio. Autodesk received quite a lot of attention when movies made by their softwares went hit. Think ‘Avatar’. Same thing with Blender and the movies which followed.
last weekend, i was in Beijing China, and met an engineer of Novell, and demoed synfig studio about 1 hour. I showed him our “Synfig Demo Reel” and some clips i downloaded from youtube/vimeo, and got lots of positive feedback. while showed “parabolic-shot”, he gave a
Count with me for farm rendering and post production because I have a fast pc and enough local storage.
The hardest part is the selection of the content, the script, the preparation of the sifz files reading the original sources and the sync with the music. I prefer to concentrate on coding for the moment.
-G
