While my site is manually translated to dozens of languages, the forum entries in it obviously aren't. That's where auto-translation can be useful. I've been using Google's Translate button but currently experiencing problems with it (in this question).
So I've decided to try Bing Translate Widget which doesn't seem to deliver as the auto-detect finds a single language on the page and translates only from it. So my multi-language forum topic doesn't get translated with it at all.
1/ Is there a quick way to make the widget be aware of different languages in the same page?
2/ Is there a way using Javascript to instruct it to translate by which will obviously produce better results?
Thanks
Related
I am whatever comes before 'novice' in programming. I have written macros in VBA for Excel, and used Visual Studio a bit when I was younger, but that's about it.
My problem: To produce the reports I need at work, I have to extract data that is stored behind user-friendly query forms on my company's intranet. I have automated every other part of the report except this. I would like to write a program to access this webpage and fill in query forms for me with preset values, and then return the data that is output. I had a discussion with a computer scientist friend of mine who said this was easy to do with Haskell (his language of choice). However I'm no veteran so I'd like to learn a language a bit nearer to my level... Python seems a good bet.
My question: is it possible to do this type of data extraction with Python? How difficult would it be, and what is a good resource to teach myself about it?
I've done some research and come up with Scrapy, but I can't tell whether it fills in forms. Also, if there are other languages more suited to this, I'd be glad to hear it.
The easiest way is just to use urllib2. Usually, arguments to your forms are transferred to the servers so that you can see them in the URL as ?foo=bar&bla=blah. You can generate arguments to your forms with urllib2.urlencode:
Python and urllib2: how to make a GET request with parameters.
For a newbie, you formulate your thoughts very clear, congrats.
I would start by reading some basic tutorials on HTTP. A form is basically just a visual way to collect data. The meat of the form is the request your browser makes with that form data.
So "filling in forms" is really not necessary (it may be though, hopefully its not because it CAN get complicated). What is necessary is learning what request that form actually makes to the browser and emulating it. A super easy way to do this is with chrome developer tools or a firefox extensions called firebug. Each of these provide you with a way to see all network traffic, including forms.
for example if you have a form where you have to submit a data and a report type the actual web request may look like
?date=2012-09-12&type=overview
so basically you would just have to find a way to make a http request to the url with that data. This is a trivial task and pretty much all languages have a way to do this.
It is very possible to do this with python. There is an abundance of tutorials out there. Python has url libraries built into the standard library that can help
http://docs.python.org/library/urllib.html
Everytime I use urllib2 I usually end up at http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/articles/urllib2.shtml
Combining loginform and scrapy, you can automate filling forms and crawling web pages.
Here's a tutorial on it. http://blog.scrapinghub.com/2012/10/26/filling-login-forms-automatically/
I am developing a multilingual web application that has a nice looking UI. I thought using CSS 3's font-face property to make it even nicer UI, but I'm not really sure if that's a good idea. According to some people I have talked to, different languages need different fonts. This means that there is no single font that can display characters of all languages, because the same character may look different across languages.
For example, according to Wikipedia, the Unicode code point U+4EE4 looks different in Korean and Japanese languages.
So my question is, would it make most sense to contain the fonts within the language packs -- or within the themes of my UI?
If you're going multi-language, use the lang or xml:lang attributes to properly call out the language of a text snippet or the page to the browser and let the browser decide the proper font. This should work much more reliable than trying to do this from CSS.
I have a small application that will be used by both spanish and english users. The application has about four webpages with various asp.net functions. The database backend is sound.
What is the best approach for the front end / UI? Two websites with the different languages ? A single website with all text in both EN, ES? Or a single website with text appearing in the language of their choosing?
EDIT: This is an ASP.NET application
Two websites with different languages is a lot of maintenance. Any modifications made will need to be done twice. For this reason, as a programmer, I dislike it. However, if the person maintaining the site prefers it this way, then by all means, go this route.
However, if you are looking to provide a proper bilingual solution, you would definitely be better off with a single website instance, with a multilingual data provider.
There is a pretty good one for Wordpress that I have been playing with lately, called LangSwitcher. I have no idea how you have your website setup, or what you are using to develop it. Just throwing out an idea for you.
I'm unsure how to do it specifically in .NET, but a solution is to store the text in a database, and select which language as the page is generated (ideally by either URL (like /en) or cookie setting). Any resources can be stored in "en" and "es" folders, which should use the same logic to select. Then, as long as you're consistent, your translators / graphics people can just look at the raw, un-translated files, translate, put in the proper folder / database location, and viola.
Any number of languages can be handled, easily extending in the future, and it can even handle most language-specific layouts if you do the same with your CSS files. You should be using CSS to do all layout / styling anyway, in part for reasons just like this.
No matter what, you need more than one of every kind of language-specific data, so you're best off using as much text as possible so your graphics people don't have to pull double-duty in addition to the translators. Using CSS to put the text over the image lets you use a single image for any number of languages, and you can do some pretty impressive stuff with just CSS styling of text. If you want to get tricky, and don't mind breaking the site for older browsers, consider rendering things with the <canvas>. Just pull in the language-specific text & definition with Javascript.
In the meantime, there are a bunch of website widgets to do automatic translation, though they obviously don't touch images (another reason to stick with text wherever possible: anyone using a translation tool will be able to read it). I'm personally a fan of Google's: http://translate.google.com/translate_tools
None are perfect, but it's better than nothing.
I'm a software developer, and I'm going onto a project now that involves implementing a website using ASP.NET (3.5 / 2008, using the Web Client Software Factory). I've been tasked at creating a UI / UX Design Document for the project, however I don't really know where to start.
I've been on one project in 3 years where there was a formal UI design document, which included layout and style guidelines/rules (e.g. the application has a header, navigation, etc., links must be colour A, buttons for positive actions must be on the right, etc. etc.). It was pretty useful in hindsight, I appreciated that someone went into that much effort too - even defining the CSS classes in the document. However, the doc was based on an existing application and conformed to the business' overall corporate identity.
The current project is a new project, which at the moment doesn't have clearly defined requirements (yes, I know... how do you design when there aren't many requirements... I digress). It is hard to know what functionality exactly will be needed. There are two different user types / personas, but no formal research will be performed on them for this document. Also, I'm not sure of the corporate identity, apart from that the business has some rules regarding use of their logo, which I'll only get further clarification on in a few days time.
So I'm slightly in the dark, throwing paint at a canvas, hoping I get a pretty picture at the end (if only I were Jackson Pollock).
What would you include in this document? It is aimed at the business (the client), as well as the developers. I can think of only the below:
Layout - header, footer, content, navigation
Styles - colour palette and styles of the different expected components
User Interactions - when a user performs an action and must wait they are notified by a modal dialog, validation is done using AJAX, navigation should be contextual, tasks should be performed with a minimum amount of clicking / navigation, etc. etc.
Has anyone got any experience in creating such a document, or any known, tried and tested process for UI design?
Thanks,
James
There' all sorts of elements that could be included in such a set of documentation:
visual style guidelines (colors, typefaces, sizes, icons, etc)
branding guidelines (corporate logos, colors, messaging, etc.)
copyrighting style guide (terminology, proper messaging, proper voice, etc.)
persona/demographic targetting
page layout guidelines
CSS guidelines/standards
JS guidelines/standards
use cases
accessibility issues
usability issues
example implementations
IA path flows
Wireframe components
etc.
I'd pick up this book if you can to give you a start on thinking about this:
http://www.amazon.com/Web-Anatomy-Interaction-Frameworks-ebook/dp/B002ZY5FCW/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262983955&sr=8-2
Along with all the other obvious components of your planning document, it would be a good idea to sketch portions of the UI along with an accompanying narrative of the specific use cases illustrated.
I've had issues in the past when attempting to communicate UI ideas. It is often useful to make sketches of dialog boxes and sequences of actions. If those sketches look too "real", then there is a tendency for them to become the spec for the final product.
To mitigate this, I've been playing with Balsamiq Mockups. It has the nice property that it is an editable back of a napkin, and deliberately renders all objects and screen layouts with a hand-drawn feel. I like the results I've achieved with it for small, internal projects. I haven't (yet) had the chance to use it for a large project with many external stakeholders.
The Wikipedia article for Human Interface Guidlines has some great links that I was going to suggest. Some of them may have far more information than you require, but they should give you a good idea as to what types of things you should add.
I have always found Apple's guidelines very complete and useful, but they are definitely very complete and require a lot of reading.
UX documentation is a critical part of the UX design procedure. It functions as a connection, providing context to the product’s lifespan from the initial concept to the present iteration.
Good UX documentation is straightforward yet lean. It should be favorably attentive, actionable, and purposeful. UX documentation is a functional document of a product’s journey from the beginning to the current release. This documentation is important for several reasons:
Organizational memory
Onboarding & handovers
Single source of truth
Fosters better communication & collaboration
A valuable R&D and IP
I've been trying to do more Web development work recently (I currently do other tech stuff, but have some experience with Java, C++, VB, Python, and PHP) and I was asked to create a basic Web site with an image viewer. The site is for an artist and she wants the viewer so users can see thumbnails of her paintings and click them to see a large version.
There are a bunch of existing programs out there (for example, simpleviewer)--most seem to be Flash-based. I want to create my own for various reasons, not least of which is to learn about how to do it. Can anyone give me suggestions/opinions as to what technology to use and how to proceed? Not detailed steps, just pointers in the right direction. (For example, are there existing scripts I could find on the net and then tinker with/modify?) I'm already doing research to figure this out, but advice from savvy programmers will save me some time.
I don't know much about Flash or Ajax, but am willing to learn either (and would eventually like to learn both). I won't be shelling out $700 for Flash Pro right now, so I would need to use something like FlashDevelop if I go that route. Thanks in advance!
You'll want jQuery. jQuery.com
Jquery has tons of useful plugins: jquery plugins page
Start searching! Here's a good one i found searching for "image galley"
Enjoy. Jquery is your friend. Of course this post is biased. So, to give credits to others, you can also look into mootools, YUI, prototype, scriptaculous, etc.
If you are going to go down the flash root definitely look at http://slideshowpro.net/ (you don't need the Flash IDE to customise it - all done via XML settings)
An alternative is via JavaScript. A couple of cool scripts to look at are:
http://jquery.com/demo/thickbox/
http://fancy.klade.lv/
You can scan the images, base64 encode them into a database, then use an < img > tag on your site to point to a PHP page that base64 decodes the images. No real way to watermark them though you could do that before the you load them using GIMP or some similar tool.