- Peter (Bubble Fish):
- Blog
- My Idea
- About Me
- Judge's Comments
Round 1
This is cool, and the programmer in me sees exactly how Bubble Fish could be done in a very reasonable way. Since I think the implementation wouldn’t be too difficult, that leaves lots of time for cool UI tricks. Yay!
I’d also suggest that the applets/modules for extending Bubble Fish use Objc as a base, but then also have the ability to use your scripting language of choice (Lua or Python or *gasp* AppleScript). Flexibility is good.
I like this idea but the name really has to go. All I can think of is Ambrosia’s Bubble Trouble when this one comes up.
Looking up e.g. selected text (on the internet) can be done with less than a handful of key strokes when using tools like Quicksilver.
So the potential advantage of Bubble Fish should be to lower that to a single key stroke (like Tiger’s dictionary lookup on ??D) and it should, as noted in the entry, present the information in the actual pop-up.
So whether or not this entry has merit would likely be decided on whether or not it is possible to present the information retrieved in a useful way.
I am a little skeptical about e.g. reading wikipedia articles in pop-up windows, but I have grown very dependent on Tiger’s dictionary pop-up window.
I don’t like this idea much. The problem, I think, is that to be useful, it needs to be super-fast in popping up the data you want. For example, if you want the translation of “la chichona”, you want to just mouse over the words and hit your key command that means, “Hey, Bubble Fish! Grab the current word, make sure I have an internet connection, send it to the Mexican slang translation website, wait for the Mexican slang translation website to translate it and send it back, then format that nicely and show it to me in a popup window. NOWWW!!!!”
If it takes too long, users won’t use it - they’ll just copy the word, jump into their browser, and paste instead. Or not worry about it and go on with whatever they were actually trying to accomplish.
And there’s no way to fix it except by having all of the information locally on your computer. You can’t guess ahead of time what word the user is going to send to Bubble Fish, in order to “prewarm” the data. It could be anything, sent to any of the websites Bubble Fish knows about.
So, while I think the idea itself is good, I think in implementation, it’s not going to be too useful. Which is unfortunate, as it’d be cool.