I program plugins for WordPress (open-source blog software), and Poedit is an excellent program for making my plugins "translation friendly". It's main purpose appears to be to allow you to open .po files and add translated strings for each text string therein. It is excellently suited for this job, and flawlessly (and automatically) creates the necessary .mo files.

It will also create .pot files from the source files, but this feature is strangely hidden. For instance, the program will not even open a .pot file dropped on to it, even though they are functionally identical to .po files (a .pot file is simply a template for a .po file). Similarly, the Open dialog is targeted specifically at .po files, and doesn't recognize .pot files unless you switch it to "all files *.*")

I think my biggest irritation is that there is no ability to edit the entries directly. I can add and edit a translation of a string, but not, for example, _delete_ one. When working with WordPress there are inevitable some strings that are already covered in the main program's .mo file, and thus not needed in my plugin's translation ("Options Saved" and so forth). I would love to just pick one and hit "delete" but instead I have to open the file in a separate text editor, track down the entry manually, and delete it there.

There are a handful of other minor un-Mac-like annoyances, such as the fact that command-w does not close the current window. This is minor stuff and easily fixed. As for opening.pot files, I simply set Poedit as the default program for those files, and thus can just double-click them. It would also be nice if this program added a couple niceties such as the ability to HTML encode/decode strings automatically, but again, these are minor quibbles.

Overall this is an excellent little program that accomplishes a fairly obscure task quite well.