The basic idea for the Bubble Fish program is not really novel, and has been implemented before in limited ways. Essentially, a mouse hover (or other event) triggers pop-up windows containing information about the text located under or near the cursor. For a very good example related to translating Japanese web pages, point the following at any Japanese page:
http://www.popjisyo.com/WebHint/Portal_e.aspx
Another example is how recent versions of Trillian will give you pop-ups with Wikipedia content for selected words in your messages.
The Bubble Fish program would perform this function with the following improvements:
1) It would function on any visible text in any application on the desktop. (hot-keys to turn it on/off.) The major technical challenge of the project is of course to grab the text without the cooperation of the containing applications. Obviously, it’d be better to give info with just a mouse hover, so one approach is to grab the screen graphics around the cursor and use optical character recognition to get the text.
2) It would function with multiple data sources, either local or on the web. For example, English dictionary, language X to language Y dictionary, encyclopedia, etc. The main app handling the text grabbing and pop-up displays would have a plug-in architecture to allow custom data sources.
I haven’t found any apps that do this. (If anyone knows of one, please tell me and I’ll just use that!)
My original motivation for this project was Japanese to English translation. The solution I linked above works great for the web, but what about other Japanese text that may be on my systems? Personally, I believe that we’re currently living in the dark ages of computer software. Usually, people probably don’t know that they’re living in a dark age; everything probably looks pretty modern to them. But in this case, I think it’s obvious. (I mean, Windows is the dominant operating system!) There’s some text on my screen - I can see the text - there are databases out there with all kinds of information about that text - I don’t know that information. Why the hell should I have to highlight the text, copy it, open some browser or app, paste the text, then click some button just to get that information? Isn’t the computer supposed to be working for me? Anyway, the bad thing about dark ages is that simply realizing you’re in one doesn’t get you out of it. You can just make little steps in that direction. I think this would be a pretty nifty step. I hope you think so too.
More details of the app are to come. (Assuming someone doesn’t say “Heh, X does that already!”)
