Wow! My very own picture on a web site that more than 10 people will see.
Now that I’ve had a few days to think about this in more detail, I want to post up more thoughts on how Bubble Fish might work. I’d love to here other thoughts and criticisms, and I’ll try to incorporate all good ideas.
First, I want to describe my vision for how things might work assuming all the technical problems can be solved adequately. Again, these ideas are not necessarily the best ones; if you have better ideas, please contribute. Go Bubble Fish!
Bubble Fish Manager
We’ll need some app to handle BubbleFish configuration. Following are some things it would handle:
- install/uninstall data source plug-ins
- select which data sources are active
- select which data source is the default
- set general options, things like bubble transparency level, launching on startup, mouse-hover delay, hotkey selection, other bubble pop-up behaviors, etc.
General Operation
Bubble Fish would run in the background and most of the time wouldn’t do anything; you obviously can’t have things popping up while you’re working. When you come across a word or phrase on which you want to search, a control key would activate Bubble Fish. In the best of all possible worlds, simply hovering the mouse cursor over a word would be enough for Bubble Fish to figure out what the word is. Assuming for a minute that that worked, for as long as Bubble Fish remained active, you would get an information pop-up for anything you hovered over. There are a bunch of options for when pop-ups go away. They could go away as soon as you move the mouse away (but not into the pop-up), stay until another pop-up appears, stick around based on some control key, etc.
Searches would be done using the default data source. If you had multiple sources active, that might not be the right one for a particular word. In that case, a control key would give a selection bar in which you could tab through the active data sources to the one you need. They could be identified by name and a cool graphic that visually identifies them. You’d probably want the new one you select to become the new default.
It would also be nice to have an automatic mode in which if a search yielded no results, it would automatically try the next data source in the active source list. For example, if you selected a French word, but the default source was a Japanese dictionary, there would be no results. If you had a French dictionary in the source list, it would eventually get a match there. The effectiveness of this mode would obviously depend on the speed of the searching. During such a process, Bubble Fish could give you a status pop-up telling you which source it was currently trying.
Another control key would deactivate Bubble Fish. However, it might be nice to be able to make certain pop-ups sticky so they stay around until you close them manually. You’d need to be able to move them around on the screen in that case.
Information content
Bubble Fish would handle the display of the information. The best format for data source plug-ins to provide to Bubble Fish might be HTML. Whatever the format, it would need to support graphics and formatting so we can display rich and organized information. Also, it’s important that the plug-ins be able to provide the display format since that will depend on the type of information. It would also need hyper-links. Normal links might launch the page in your default browser. We might also have special links that would trigger another Bubble Fish search using the same pop-up.
Potential data sources
The sky’s the limit here, and there are more potentially useful sources than just I could think of. Most would probably be on the web, but for some cases where there are free downloadable databases for things you use heavily (e.g. foreign language dictionaries), it would be nice to have the data local to speed up the response time. Among the sources I can thing of:
- language X to language X dictionaries
- language X to language Y dictionaries
- special purpose technical dictionaries
- encyclopedias
- standard search facilities
— web keyword (i.e. Google)
— image search (Google, Flickr, etc.)
— video search (Google, YouTube, etc.)
- local system searches
— your email
— your documents
— i.e. Spotlight!
Ok, so that’s my basic vision. Next time, the tough part - what will make or break Bubble Fish - some thoughts on how Bubble Fish can grab the text.
Go Bubble Fish!!
