I just thought I’d share something I ran across today with iOS 6 and UISwitch controls.

If you put a UISwitch in a XIB and expect the text inside of the UISwitch to appear in the right language, iOS 6 will look in your app’s (current region name).lproj for a file named (same as xib).strings.

For example, if I have a UI defined in SettingsViewController.xib, and that UI has a UISwitch, and I want a Japanese user to see that switch’s on/off in Japanese, I need to make a file named ja.lproj/SettingsViewController.strings. The strings file doesn’t need to have anything in it, but it can’t be zero length. The easiest thing to do is just throw in something like:

And then convert that file to a binary plist using the plutil command-line tool:

Note: don’t forget the ‘1’ in binary1. More information on man plutil.

If you’re developing exclusively within XCode 5, then I’d suggest just localizing any XIBs and let XCode do the magic for you.