Blue Lotus Blog

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.

So one thing that I have been thinking about doing for a while is putting up a forum. Forums seem to be an easy way to allow people to openly solicit help and appear to be an essential ingredient in fostering a community around a product or site. The problem is that they also come with the ongoing responsibility of management, spam fighting and the like. I have decided that now the effort is worth it and have opened up the Aoren Forums! The logins between both the blog commenting and forum access are shared so you only have to sign up to one to get access to the other (in theory, there might still be some snags for a while).

It has been a while (Oct 2006) since the last release of Langauge Aid and it is high time for a revamp. Language Aid 1.1 is actually a fairly big upgrade from the previous version of 1.0.1. This is mainly because the nature of Language Aid is changing from that of being an exclusively Japanese oriented tool to one of a more general nature. The most requested feature for Language Aid by far has been something like… “Can you get Language Aid to support language _______?” To which I have had to previously answer that it does not :(. But with the release of version 1.1 now a lot of text processing functionality has been exported to plugins! This means that anyone with some programming experience can now write a plugin that will interface with any web service or lookup system that they want by using a straightforward SDK. The hope is that people who desire functionality for using Language Aid with other languages or services now have the power in their hands to make it happen. I would also like to foster a community around Language Aid plugins as well as expand the number and variety of plugins that are shipped with Language Aid. All in all, a very exciting release for me. However, there is a lot more good stuff coming in the future so stay tuned.