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Dynamic Language Tools – Text to Speech Support

Monday, September 10th, 2012

I have published a new version of the Dynamic Language Tools today. This new version has following two main features:

Text to Speech Support
The new text to speech feature, lets you highlight any text on the web-page, and then convert it to the audio on the fly. This feature uses the Microsoft Bing API to convert the text to speech. Plus using the Playground area, you can also play audio file of any text you want directly on the web-page.

The use of this feature is as simple, as others. First make sure that “Show Speak Floating Button” is enabled in the Speech I/O page of the Dynamic Language tools preferences as shown below:

Dynamic Language Tools - Preferences Page

If it’s not checked, just check/select this. Now hold down the control key, and select the required text on the web-page. This should display the following floating panel, and clicking on the speak icon should display the audio player window, which lets you hear the audio of the selected text:

Dynamic Language Tools - Speech Floating Button

Chrome Contextual Menus
The other new exciting feature is contextual menu for the Chrome extension. This new version adds few new Contextual Menus (depends on the Preferences) which helps you do instant translation, transliteration and dictionary look-up of the selected text on the web-pages as shown below:

Dynamic Language Tools - Contextual Menus

I hope you find these features handy. Any comments, complains or suggestions are welcome.

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Google Website Translator and Skipping Translation Segments

Saturday, August 18th, 2012

I have been using the Google Website Translator widget on my website for few years, and I’m quite happy with that. The machine translation is not very accurate, but it does provide some help in case someone doesn’t know the target language at all.

Plus, I had also been using the Google Translate API for my Dynamic Subtitles Translator product for a year or so, and then Google decided to discontinue that service and made it Paid only. I tried going with Microsoft Bing Translator, and though it’s free, it has monthly traffic limit. So, at the end, I have to revert back to Google Website Translator widget which do the job, but then it translate all the page, and not just the subtitles I want to translate, and it looks quite bad in the end.

Today when inspecting the Google Translator header widget, I found something interesting and that’s the wrapper DIV and IFRAME elements of the Google Translate bar has the CSS class of “skiptranslate”. My hunch was that this is something which is preventing the translation of this block on the page. So, I quickly tested this and applied this class to few of my DIV elements, and sure enough, this did the job.

So, at the end, I just added the “skiptranslate” to all the elements other than subtitles which needs to be translated, and this works great. You can view this at:
http://www.syedgakbar.com/products/dst/

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Captain Jack Sparrow Compass

Monday, July 23rd, 2012

I will soon be publishing my new Android Application called “Jack Sparrow Compass” which is inspired by legendary Jack Sparrow Compass. The following dialog from the movie Pirates of Caribbean best describe this:

“My compass…is unique.”
“Unique here having the meaning of broken?”
“True enough, this compass does not point north.”
“…Where does it point?”
“It points to the thing you want most in this world”
– Jack Sparrow and Elizabeth Swann

This compass is unique because it too doesn’t points to the North (it can optionally do this too), but instead it points to wherever you want to go. Plus it also shows the distance to the target location and also your movement speed. If that’s not enough, it also shows the magnetic fields around your device so you not only can detect the metals, but can also detect ghost and spirits (at least in theory).

Jack Sparrow Compass

Here are some prominent features of this application:

  • Allows you to store unlimited visited locations.
  • At any time, get the distance, direction and route (using Google Maps) to any of stored locations.
  • Detect and show the ambient magnetic field.
  • Detect your current locations using various options like GPS, Wireless LAN, and/or from nearest cell tower.

Here are some of the application snapshots:

Jack Sparrow Compass - Home Screen Add New Location Add New Location

Jack Sparrow fans, stay tuned for updates and application download link.

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Posted in Android, Products | 1 Comment »

GRE Flash Cards

Sunday, July 1st, 2012

I have been working on the GRE examp preparation for few months now, and one of the hardest part of all this preparation was toiling through more than 3700 words list and remembering their description and ideally an example on how to best use each word too.

Soon tired of looking through meaning of all these words online (you can’t sit in front of your computer all day), I decided to build my GRE Flash cards. While there are many online, pre-printed and printable solutions available (just try searching for the “GRE Flash Cards”), I was not able to find which matched my requirements perfectly.

When its come to already printed flash cards, I think one of the most reputed are the Barron’s New GRE Flash Cards, but unfortunately, these were not available in my locality. So tired of finding the correct option, and in true spirit of software developer, I decided to create my own. I got the words list from a friend which was in a simple text file. I loaded this into a new 4D Database, and then with just one or two hours of effort, I had  some nice and simple flash cards which can be printed on the A4 page. There were actually two reports, one had only the Words (front of a page), and the other had the corresponding definitions (back of the flash card). So these two can be printed on front and back of A4 page so that you can flip the card in hand to quickly look for its definition.

These printed flash cards have helped me a lot in my preparation, so I thought to share these with you all too. Here is how these two reports looks like:

Words Definition with Examples

And you can download these two PDF files (word and definition) from following links:

Words List (PDF)
Definition List (PDF)

I hope you find these handy.

PS: I also ended up creating a simple GRE Vocabulary application which has built in quizzes and study screens. Unfortunately, I can’t make an executable of this, so this requires 4D Standalone Application. If any of you are interested in that, please let me know and I can then upload it some where too.

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Posted in Products, Windows | 5 Comments »

Basecamp Extension – Graph your time report

Saturday, September 18th, 2010

A popular adage is that “A picture is worth a thousand words”. Same is true for the graphs/chart, which is a visualization of your raw data, and gives a bird-eye-view of your thousands of lines of data on a single screen.

Basecamp is pouplar web-based Project Management solution. They have millions of hours of data, and probably you are also one of the users whose company logs thousand of hours per month on the b Basecamp. But if you look at the time report, though it gives you couple of filtering options to filter data by client, project or person, but still all you get as summary is just the totals. If you want to get something more visual then you have to export the data, open in some external application (like MS Excel) and draw a char/graph on that data. It does the job, but isn’t this a hassle?

That’s where the Basecamp Extension comes to help. This extension works under Google Chrome, and gives you instant and on the fly charting tool to display a summary of your time report. Here is a sample chart showing last 7 days working hours of all the company persons:

And here is another sample chart, showing all the company clients hours grouped by the date (multi-series chart):

You also get support for different charts type like Area, Bar, Line, Pie, etc to help you visualize the data in the best way. Go ahead, give it a try (if you are a basecamp user) and share you feedback on:
Basecamp Extension Page

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