Language Aid 1.1.1 is out! | |
| October 23rd, 2007 | |
 Spencer Nielsen   |
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.