It’s a neat tool. This is a movie of how it works:

(After re-watching the movie, my tones are kind of bad on n词酷. It should be cíkù. Also I say the c sounds more like “s” instead of “ts” a few times -sorry about that.)

You can play around in the language tools section of google to find the gems, or you watch this demo to vicariously see it in action:

The one thing Google translate doesn’t do, however, is show you how to pronounce the characters / words. To solve this (for myself anyway) I put together this little scriptlet that will query Dict.cn.

The following scriptlet will work just like the ones in the movie. Just drag the link below to your bookmark bar, highlight any word on the page (English or Chinese), and then click the link. Sha-bang, you have the Simplified Mandarin equivalent and how to pronounce it. Slick.

(My Dict.cn scriptlet has only been tested on Firefox and Safari on Mac.)

Update: as one might expect, the dict.cn script works on Firefox Windows and Firefox Linux. It does not work on Internet Explorer however. If you want to use it in IE, you are free to tweak the code. It’s just two lines:

javascript:x=getSelection();window.location='http://dict.cn/search/?q='+x;

Here is what it looks like now:

It actually looks like something I would want on my desktop now. You can download it on the widgets page.

The other new widget is a Chinese word for the day widget.

I know I am going a bit overboard with the whole Chinese thing, but I am having a lot of fun learning Chinese. It’s nice to have a hobby that is mostly outside of computers, but still can tie in when I want to learn and play at the same time.

This widget is a feed to my Chinese site - the site where I am keeping all my class notes and miscellaneous findings. I am going to look up a new word every day (or mostly everyday) and post it on the site which will go right to the widget. Here is what the widget looks like:

The widget lists the word in pinyin, simplified, and traditional. When you flip the widget over it shows the English translation. You can download the Chinese widget on the widgets page as well.

I’ve been doing some regular expression work the past couple of days, and the look of the widget started to bother me. It was very “programmer art”ish - it works fine, but it just looked cheap. This version is not a leap and bound improvement, but it is a lot easier on the eyes.

You can download it here

While I was at it, I whipped up a narcissism widget. An RSS reader widget that does nothing but load the entries from this site - I know, I know, just what you’ve always wanted.

Since it wont have it’s own page, and I want to try out picture uploading in TextMate, here is what the widget looks like:

Have fun. (The Regex Widget is actually useful).

(Kalator is an ad server that only shows open source ads) A weird phenomena seems to be happening with the Kalator ads. When people figure out that all the ads are for open source software, they tend to hit refresh a few times to see what other ads will show up. Probably because the ads aren't trying to sell you anything; just tell you about cool open source stuff.

For a hoot, I whipped up a Kalator widget that will cycle through the 120×90 ads. As new ads are added they will show up in the widget as well. I am not exactly sure how helpful it is, but it's a nice way to peruse Kalator.

• ShakeASpear - Shakespearean-like insult generator. It is inspired by the site http://www.pangloss.com/seidel/Shaker/. This widget was a gift for my wife (it was her idea, and she asked me if I could write it for her).
• RegexWidget - Simple regular expression tester. Useful when trying out regexs for Javascript code, and somewhat useful when trying to build regular expressions for other languages (like sed, ruby, or perl).
• Terminal - Javascript and System terminal. In other words, it is an interactive javascript shell and a bash shell emulator. The javascript shell contains all of the Neuromancer libraries.
• FTP Uploader - The FTP Uploader widgets allows you to use drag and drop to upload a file to an FTP server. You can setup several FTP servers, and you don't need to buy anything to get it to work. The software is made available under the terms of the LGPL.

Some people have a bit of trouble using the FTP Uploader. Here is a quick example of how it works (the widgets are appearing by pressing the F12 key):

Let me know if you have any questions or comments. The Tiki heads on the widget project page link to wikis if I have one setup for the widget. If there is no wiki / bug tracker setup for the widget you can post comments here if you like.

There are already some drag and drop FTP widgets on apple.com, but they either require you to buy an FTP program or are shareware. While this is not as full featured as the others, and only handles FTP at the moment, you can’t beat the price.

You can download it here (the software is made available under the terms of the LGPL. By downloading or using the software you agree to the terms of the LGPL). Once it’s installed click the i in the lower right corner, and add a server. It will attempt passive mode first and if that fails it will try active.

After you have a server setup, click done. Now whenever you’d like to upload a file, find it in finder, start to drag, press the F12 key. Dashboard will appear. Then drag the file to the widget and presto your file is uploaded.

Here are a couple things to watch out for:
* It stores passwords in an unsafe way, but if you are using FTP…
* You can only upload one file at a time
* It wont let you upload files with spaces in the name

Still, it makes my life easier.

Enjoy.