Blue Lotus Blog

That means that Language Aid can now grab text from it and perform lookups. It has been a long time coming and it a significant enough change that Steve mentioned it in his keynote at the music event. This is somewhat less significant these days because there are two other ways independent from the Accessibility API that Language Aid has to grab text from applications. However, the fact that iTunes was a first party app made it quite a big omission. To its credit I suspect that this was due to the entire interface being implemented independently of any OS frameworks to allow for easier porting to Windows and higher consistency in behavior between the app on the two platforms.

There are a few major apps that still do not fully support Apple’s Accessibility API fully (Office, Firefox, I am looking at you…) but every little step helps.

The changes included in this round are the usual bug fixes for stability/performance and the like. There is also one major change involving the results window. The results windows are now normal Mac OS X windows with typical window behavior instead of the previous overlay window style. This allows you to put other windows in-front of the results windows instead of them always floating on top of everything. With that there is also the change that you can use command-W to close the results windows in addition to the other methods of dismissal.

Almost all of the feature or behavior additions/changes that have gone in to Language Aid updates have originated from user feedback. I am very grateful to my users for their suggestions and requests so that Language Aid can continue to grow and improve. Thanks and keep it coming!

I havn’t really done very much marketing of my products. Mostly because I want to spend most of my time in actual product development. However, my thoughts sometimes turn to promotion and marketing and how to do it better. Lately I have observed that many products are advertised on what they DON’T have. A product is promoted as not having certain bad things rather than emphasizing that it has these other good things. Thus is the way of business, politics and many other areas of society as of late.

I have decided to think of a few catchy anti-features for Language Aid that are surely going to send sales through the roof. Here are just a few that I have come up with as I have been sitting here:

Who needs boring feature lists detailing what a product DOES have. When people see the substantial list of what Language Aid doesn’t have, I am sure they will think twice before passing up purchasing such a great program! Perhaps now I have found my true calling…

Deadlock is the name for my copy-protection/registration framework that I have been using in Language Aid since version 1.0. It has worked faithfully for me since then and I have have decided to share it with other developers who might be looking for such functionality or looking to bump up their protection a little.

I have long heard many developers argue that most of the time pirates wouldn’t purchase your software anyway and so you shouldn’t bother putting that much effort into fighting it except for the most basic and obvious of protections. In most cases it just isn’t economical. I generally agree with this but the reason that I put so much effort into Deadlock to protect a $20 program was more personal education and entertainment than anything else. I must admit that I had a lot of fun thinking of how to hack the program, come up with a countermeasure, then come up with a circumvention of that countermeasure and then engineer a protection against that back and forth over and over again. I mostly just thought of the kinds of reverse-engineering that I have performed on other software for entertainment and then researched methods to prevent such fun. In the end I thought I had a pretty good setup of minimally invasive mechanisms to prevent piracy for my software.

Deadlock has been refined over the course of Language Aid releases and as of Language Aid 1.1.1 it was built out as its own separate product. I have wanted to refine it and add more diverse functionality to it for a long time. To accomplish this Deadlock needs more clients, preferably applications outside of Aoren Software. In the future I also plan on productizing my payment processing engine (works hand in hand with Deadlock) that makes paying for and registering Language Aid easy, fast and instant (no serial numbers, no confirmation emails, just instant gratification). I wanted to end this post by citing one of the many insightful quips from Bruce Schneier in order to emphasize that security invasion is inevitable and that defenses are simply deterrents. Instead I give you this:

The user’s going to pick dancing pigs over security every time.

— Bruce Schneier

The latest update to Language Aid includes a plugin that really shows off its power and utility. Version 1.1.3 includes a plugin for Google Translate which performs general language translation in a multitude of tongues. One of the great features of Google Translate is that it can auto-detect the source language on its own in many cases. What this means is that the next time you are surfing the web and see text that is in a language you don’t understand, you can immediately see the translation of it in your native language. This addition greatly widens the potential user base for Language Aid by significantly expanding the language capability from just Japanese and Chinese dictionary lookups. “Your” language is now supported.

Launch Services is one of those things that does a lot of magic for Mac OS X but is not really visible on the surface and is somewhat vague and ethereal. Launch Services is responsible among other things, for associating file types with applications, associating icons, associating system services and many other wonderful things that make your experience just work. Fortunately there is a tool to poke at the Launch Services database buried in the system at:

Most notably the -dump command basically outputs the database so that you can see exactly why a certain file type wants to be opened by which app and why certain files get their icons and association hijacked by some other random new app. The -f command will let you update the database with any new changes you have made to an application or bundle.

Some of things managed by this database are the system services that show up in the “Services” option under the application menu (these are outlined in the NSServices array of a bundle’s Info.plist). Language Aid provides one of these as an alternative to the lookup trigger and contextual menu as a way to lookup text. Unfortunately, it appears that just tickling the database with the new information about which options you want available in the menu (dictated by which plugins you have selected), is not enough to rebuild the Services menu. A reboot seems to do the trick, but it would really be nice if I could figure out what causes that menu to rebuild.

One of the things I hear most often while providing support for Langauge Aid is something along the lines of “I hovered my cursor over text in some program, hit the lookup trigger and it didn’t do anything/grabbed the wrong text.” This is sometimes because the application they want to grab text from does not support the Accessibility API or sometimes because what they were hovering over wasn’t really text. Thus I have added a feature in version 1.1.2 that should help alleviate confusion.

Now in Language Aid 1.1.2 if you hold down the lookup trigger for more than one second, a highlight bubble will appear containing the text that will be grabbed if you let up your lookup trigger. You can also move the cursor around while holding the lookup trigger to see the exact text that would be grabbed from any point that your mouse cursor can hover over. So now if you are unsure about what text will be sent to the plugin, simply hold down the lookup trigger and move the mouse cursor around until you find the text you want. The highlight bubble is also slightly translucent so you can see the text under it.

I have also slightly overhauled the main Language Aid website to focus more on the the three different ways that you can use Language Aid to grab text. I have added short videos that explain and demonstrate each way. Also, a quick side note on Quicktime video encoding…the “Prepare for Internet Streaming” setting is BAD. When run in my web browser I found that my videos would often play for a bit, then the video would freeze but the progress slider would keep moving. This would continue until the end of the video. If you scrubbed through the video it would seem to display fine. However, if you scrubbed to a section in the video and then pressed play, it would play for a bit and then freeze again. Strangely enough, when played through Quicktime Player this did not happen quite as much but still occasionally would occur. I found that when I turned off the internet streaming setting this behavior stopped. Also, setting my H.264 keyframes setting to “Automatic” from 24 seemed to cut my file sizes in half. I suppose the moral of the story is that it pays to deviate from the default video encoding settings.

There are four fairly major changes/additions in this version of Language Aid which make it more compatible and easier to use.

The first of which is the added “Services” menu item. This new feature adds a Language Aid submenu to the Services item in the application menu. From here you can trigger any of your currently enabled plugin modules and have them act on the text you currently have selected in an application. This has the added benefit of being able to grab text from applications that don’t support the Accessibility API (required for Language Aid compatibility before) very well or even at all! This does not mean that Language Aid can act on text in every application but it does get it a lot closer!

The second major addition to version 1.1.1 is the contextual menu item which is very similar to the services menu. If you select a block of text in an application that supports contextual menu items and right click (or control-click for one button mice) a contextual menu with your active plugins are displayed which can act on the selected text block. Now you can have your plugin act on exactly what you select in Safari instead of having it broken up by links and other formatting! Again, this doesn’t work with every application but it significantly broadens Language Aid’s reach.

The third major feature is the inclusion of the MDBG plugin! This is a new plugin that performs Chinese dictionary lookups in a similar manner to the WWWJDIC plugin. This plugin was originally announced in a previous post and has been available through Language Aid’s built in software update but is now included standard with Language Aid. Gradually we hope to expand Language Aid’s reach to more and more languages!

The last reason to upgrade to version 1.1.1 is for Mac OS X Leopard compatibility. There were a few changes in Apple’s new operating system that caused previous versions (<= 1.1) to not behave as expected. These changes have now been accounted for and going forward Language Aid should be fully compatible with both Tiger and Leopard. Perhaps at one point in the future we will start to take advantage of Leopard specific behavior.

At long last we have another plugin for Language Aid! Today a plugin for the Chinese dictionary lookup site MDBG was released for Language Aid version 1.1. This plugin is similar in function to the WWJDIC plugin in that it can take small or large chunks of Chinese text, send them off to the MDBG which provides dictionary lookups for words that it parses out of the text and then display the results. Much thanks goes to the administrator of the MDBG who was very cooperative and helpful in the development of the plugin! You can get the MDBG plugin by clicking on the “Add New Modules” button the Language Aid preference pane and selecting the MDBG plugin. You may need to wait a bit before it shows up in the plugin modules list after installing and restart Language Aid to get it to work correctly. If you know of a web service that can perform translation or dictionary lookups for your favorite language let me know. Also, Language Aid 1.1.1 is just around the corner with some small (but nice) new features.

A while ago one of the editors at マックピープル (Mac People) magazine asked if they could feature Language Aid in their section on shareware/freeware. I happily accepted and greatly appreciated the free advertising. A while later they asked if they could include Language Aid on a DVD-ROM that they publish containing freeware/shareware called オンラインウェアDVD (Onlineware DVD). The DVD arrived in the mail yesterday (picture is at the right). I have not worked directly on Language Aid for a while but I do have a couple more plugin modules in mind that I want to implement and the next set of new features are all laid out. I have been working a project peripherally connected to Language Aid which has taken a lot of my time lately, but this has come to a good stopping point so that I can return to working on Language Aid more.