Languages and language independence
DeskDrawer's Store listing is available in 16 languages, and the application itself is designed so that using it depends very little on reading text at all.
There are two separate questions here, and they have different answers.
The Microsoft Store listing: 16 languages#
The DeskDrawer listing on the Microsoft Store — its description, feature list and metadata — is available in 16 languages. If your Store is set to one of them, you read about DeskDrawer in your own language before you buy it.
The application: designed to need very little language#
The application itself is a different matter, and this is the part worth understanding.
DeskDrawer's interface is icon-only. Its two menus — the Board menu and the Tray menu — contain no sentences to read: each command is a glyph. Sorting is an arrow and a symbol. Icon size is four squares of increasing size. Outline is a rectangle. Quit is a power symbol.
That is not a shortcut taken to avoid translation work. It is the same decision that keeps the menus small and fast, and it has a side effect worth naming plainly: you can use DeskDrawer comfortably whether or not your language is one of the 16.
What this looks like in practice#
| Element | What language it is in |
|---|---|
| Board and tray menus | None — icons only |
| New board names | Numbers: 1, 2, 3… |
| System icon names (This PC, Recycle Bin…) | Your Windows display language, taken from Windows |
| Right-click menu on a file | Your Windows display language — it is Windows' own menu |
| File names, folder names, tooltips | Whatever they already are on your PC |
| Store listing | 16 languages |
Two of those rows are the important ones. Because DeskDrawer shows the real Shell context menu rather than a hand-written imitation, that menu arrives already translated by Windows, in your display language, including third-party entries. And because system icons are named through the shell rather than from a built-in string table — a change made in 1.0.6 — This PC appears as Este equipo, この PC or Dieser PC according to your Windows settings, with no work on DeskDrawer's part.
Similarly, boards created new are numbered rather than given a word like "Board" or "New group". That was a deliberate change in 1.0.5, so that no layout ever contains a word in a language its owner does not read.
What is honestly still in English#
DeskDrawer is not a fully localized application and this page will not pretend otherwise:
- The application ships without satellite resource assemblies — the few strings it does own are English.
- This website and the documentation are English only.
- Error messages written by DeskDrawer itself, and the contents of error.log, are English.
In normal use you will not meet any of these. They appear when something has gone wrong, which is also when you are most likely to be reading Troubleshooting or writing to Support anyway.
The reasoning behind the icon-only interface, and what it costs, is written up in Designing an interface that barely needs language.