No product is perfect and neither is ours. We’ll be the first to admit that. We’ll admit even more: our product will never be perfect. However, there’s one promise we can make, and it has to do with speed. No cheap sales talk here. We’ll just let the facts speak for themselves.
On 29 September, Lucile and Aleks from the Professional Translators server on Discord chimed in about the design of Cattitude’s UI/UX. They specifically mentioned the sheer amount of buttons on the top of Cattitude’s screen. Now even though they’re not users of our software, it is something we had heard before and as you know, the (potential) customer is always right.
On the very same day, this…
As you see, lots of buttons have been condensed into submenus, that disappear once you’ve made your choice. Maybe you still think it’s ugly. Maybe you think the buttons should be purple with pink polka dots instead of boring grey or blue. But that’s not the point. The point is that this change was made on the very same day, after a request of someone who isn’t even a user of our product.
Amazon Web Services
A coincidence maybe. Another user of ours, Elias, mentioned on 28 September that for Brazilian-Portuguese in his field of specialty, the machine translations from Amazon Web Services (AWS) gave superior results compared to other machine translation engines he was using. Cattitude already offers support for ModernMT and DeepL, but Elias asked if it was possible to add support for a third engine.
This change is a lot harder to make and since Cattitude is only a one-man show, I told him that I would probably not be able to implement this feature until Sunday 2 October.
Today is Sunday 2 October. Here is the result:
Now nothing stops you to use the suggestion by AWS, edit it a bit to give it that human touch, and then add it to ModernMT, so that next time ModernMT’s suggestion will be better. And all of this was implemented within five days; the actual programming time it took was less than a few hours.
Consider that for a moment. Cattitude is a one-man show. Plug-ins that take months or years to implement for most CAT tool makers due to the sheer amount of bureaucracy they have or the fact that they themselves can’t program and instead just outsource everything to third-party teams that are only available so many days per year, were implemented within several hours.
That’s what I call pAWSome.
