Aoren Forums: Recent Posts

Aoren Forums: Recent Posts http://www.aorensoftware.com/blog/forum/ Aoren Forums: Recent Posts en Fri, 21 Nov 2008 11:40:17 +0000 Darren on "Off-line Dictionary Look Up" http://www.aorensoftware.com/blog/forum/topic.php?id=4#post-9 Mon, 31 Dec 2007 16:17:36 +0000 Darren 9@http://www.aorensoftware.com/blog/forum/ Hi Spencer, I did some hunting around on the Internet as well and came across the following information. I discovered the OCR technology used - at least by Dr.Mouse - was supported by Sumitomo Electric Industries who integrated ABBYY FineReader for Japanese in a tool called OKReader. The ABBYY website mentions this and has a link in the article for Chinese/Japanese/Korean OCR: <a href="http://www.abbyy.com/company/case_studies.asp?param=32137" rel="nofollow">http://www.abbyy.com/company/case_studies.asp?param=32137</a> If you this helps you out in including the mouse-over function that would be wonderful. Darren McDonald Tokyo snielsen on "Off-line Dictionary Look Up" http://www.aorensoftware.com/blog/forum/topic.php?id=4#post-8 Wed, 19 Dec 2007 01:55:43 +0000 snielsen 8@http://www.aorensoftware.com/blog/forum/ Darren, Thanks for all your great input! I have actually thought about developing an offline component for Language Aid for some time now. The issue is that currently all the parsing and lookups are performed by the web service a Language Aid plugin is hooked up to instead of being done locally. There is nothing stopping me or anyone else from writing a Language Aid plugin that does those actions on a free local dictionary. Perhaps one of these days will hunker down and figure out how to write a parser that could perform such lookups :) I wasn't aware of Dr. Mouse! It looks like quite a good program. Using OCR to read text from pictures is quite impressive. If there are any free or low cost OCR libraries I would definitely love to incorporate one of them into Language Aid and see how it performs. I have looked around a bit and found Tesseract and gocr which may fit the bill. Thanks again for your feedback! Hopefully I can get some of these features up and running in an upcoming release. Spencer Nielsen Aoren Software Darren on "Off-line Dictionary Look Up" http://www.aorensoftware.com/blog/forum/topic.php?id=4#post-7 Sun, 04 Nov 2007 14:42:52 +0000 Darren 7@http://www.aorensoftware.com/blog/forum/ Hello, I came across your software in a Japanese book on Mac software. Congratulations on getting the coverage! As you can see by the exposure, there is a great need for the type of software you are developing. I tried it out, but there are a number of things that need to be ironed out to reach a wider audience. So I would like to offer words of encouragement as well as some ideas. Firstly, I come from a PC background and have just switched to Mac because Vista was the final straw. However, there are a number of great tools in the Windows environment that I am trying to find replacements for the Mac. One Windows software used by both Japanese and non-Japanese is put out by JustSystems called "Dr. Mouse". With this application, you simply put the pointer over any word, be it in text or even graphics and a Kenkyusha dictionary would pop up with the translation in either Japanese or English. Dr. Mouse does not need you be online as it draws from the dictionary loaded on the hard drive. Dr. Mouse is great because it includes OCR technology so the software can "read" any word on the screen. Also, you do not have to be online. Another application is called Roboword. It functions in the same way that Dr. Mouse does except that you can have Roboword use almost any dictionary you have on your hard disk. The company that sells Roboword has a special package where you can use Eijiro which is THE largest English<>Japanese dictionary anywhere and is constantly being updated. The only thing with Roboword is that they have added too many other features which makes the software unstable at times. So, what I would really love Language Aid be able to do is to have OCR technology to point to any "text" on the screen and be able to draw from dictionaries from the hard disk so you do not have to be online. Also being able to work in both directions (Japanese > English AND English > Japanese) would suddenly open up a very large market. I have searched and searched for the type of software where you can point to a word on the screen and a dictionary window automatically pops up. Though Dr. Mouse had a version of OS 9, they have since stopped making Dr. Mouse for the Mac. So you have a really big business chance. Users would very from your everyday Japanese and non-Japanese trying to decipher a website or pdf manual to the semi and fully professional translator. If you are able to come up with software with the functions I have described, word would get around very quickly. I know I would tell everyone, including the Apple Stores in Tokyo where I have asked if such software exists. All the best in your programming ... I am looking forward to an exciting future! :) snielsen on "iPhone Hacking" http://www.aorensoftware.com/blog/forum/topic.php?id=3#post-6 Fri, 24 Aug 2007 04:01:48 +0000 snielsen 6@http://www.aorensoftware.com/blog/forum/ I finally did it. I jailbroke my iPhone the other day. I just couldn't resist, it was screaming for it. Unfortunately there are a million sets of how to instructions and special programs that allow you to monkey with your iPhone in an ever so differing way and not very many of them explain how they are doing it (what is com.apple.afc?) But anyway...I eventually got sshd running and the Terminal.app and ssh2 followed soon after. The next thing I wanted to do was get the toolchain and binutils running. I hit a snag in trying to compile the toolchain myself and then just decided that perhaps precompiled binaries were the order of the day in this land of alpha :) The next time I get a chance I am going to try to compile and run my own little hello world and from there...the sky's the limit. snielsen on "Animation Paradigm" http://www.aorensoftware.com/blog/forum/topic.php?id=2#post-5 Sun, 29 Jul 2007 22:12:59 +0000 snielsen 5@http://www.aorensoftware.com/blog/forum/ Ok, I understand better what you are getting at. Other things of concern in creating a design for an animtation system should be that of performance. I don't know what kind of drawing performance JavaScript can afford you but I am sure that there are a lot of techniques that can speed up the process. A lot of times when I have ideas for new systems or for example, the few animation systems that I have put together, I have found that just throwing together a quick prototype and seeing how well it works can sometimes be more efficient then trying to find the optimal design beforehand. Kalaxy on "Animation Paradigm" http://www.aorensoftware.com/blog/forum/topic.php?id=2#post-4 Thu, 26 Jul 2007 03:08:00 +0000 Kalaxy 4@http://www.aorensoftware.com/blog/forum/ No, I am not planning on having the animation pre-rendered such as cycling through a series of bitmaps. The animation that I was planing on would have actual drawing routings. Animation would happen by deciding on a different location to perform the drawing routine. So it would be like drawing frames. Draw all the objects in one location. Update all the objects to a new location and then clear the screen and draw again. So for instance I have a function that draws a word. Now I want to be able to animate that word moving across the screen. I was thinking that I would have a drawing class whose draw function would draw this word. It would have the x, y location stored in the drawing object. The corresponding animation object would hold this drawing as a member variable. It would also have the destination x, y location where the animation would end and the time it should take to perform the animation. At each frame drawing loop the animate function(s) would be called. It would look at how much time has passed and then update the drawing's object x, y accordingly. Then the screen would be cleared and the drawing's draw routine called. The next time through the loop the location of the word would be changed a little more. Thus animation would happen. Does that help explain what I'm looking to do? snielsen on "Animation Paradigm" http://www.aorensoftware.com/blog/forum/topic.php?id=2#post-3 Wed, 25 Jul 2007 00:39:06 +0000 snielsen 3@http://www.aorensoftware.com/blog/forum/ What kind of animation are you doing? Is an animation a series of bitmaps that you cycle through? What are examples of the kinds of objects that you are drawing and animating? Kalaxy on "Animation Paradigm" http://www.aorensoftware.com/blog/forum/topic.php?id=2#post-2 Tue, 24 Jul 2007 04:36:30 +0000 Kalaxy 2@http://www.aorensoftware.com/blog/forum/ So as I'm learning how to draw on an html canvas element I'm also trying to decide how to animate things. Of course there are many ways to create an animation framework as is the case with most things. However I'm wondering what is a good direction to take in general as well as specifically with a web application. Since I've never really tried to animate multiple things at once, I'm new at this seen. So I have multiple drawing functions that each draw something specific such as text or a design. I need to be able to draw each of these based on a certain animation. Each animation should probably control the location of the draw function. I'm wondering what kind of control structures I should have in place. Since this is meant to run on a web browser it needs to be fairly simple. I want it to be object oriented and extensible. My initial thought is to use two classes: drawing and animation (shown below). The drawing class would have a draw function that would be overridden depending on what is to be drawn. It would also keep track of the current location, orientation, and scale of the drawing. The second class, animation, would deal with everything that was related to that animation. Below I've shown the animation class to cover any sort of linear animation. There could be animation classes that are able to to more complex animations also. Regardless of what type of animation it is, the object's animate function would be called before each draw to update the location, orientation, and scale of the drawing that is to be drawn. I'm not sure whether the animation should be a member of the drawing or if the drawing should be a member of the animation or if they should be tied in some super class such as animation_drawing. (Below I've shown it as the drawing being a member of the animation.) Animation paths could be created by chaining multiple animations together. <pre><code>class drawing var x var y var scale var rotation function draw class animation var to_x var to_y var to_scale var to_rotation var animation_time var drawing function animate </code></pre> So to draw a drawing the drawing state would be saved, the origin would be moved to the x and y position of the drawing, the scale and rotation would also be updated, the drawing's draw function would be called, then the graphics state would be restored. As such at each frame drawn I would be able to step through all the animations to update each drawing's state. Then I would be able to step through each drawing to actually draw the drawings. Now I'm sure as I start coding this up I'll find out things that work and things that don't as well as things that I hadn't thought of. But before I begin can anyone give some pointers on how to do things? Maybe you've done something like this before and can point out what I haven't thought of already. Thanks in advance.