Since joining Twitter some of the people I follow/follow me aren’t native English speakers, so don’t post in English all of the time. (Me being nosy) I wanted to see what they were saying so tried to find a quick & easy way of translating text & web pages being linked to.

I originally tried to do it with Quicksilver & Google Translate. It was possible for most of what I wanted to do, but not all. In the end I found it quicker & easier to use LaunchBar with Google Translate. A few people asked me how to do this so I whipped up this video (I went slower than normal so it’s (hopefully) clearer what’s happening).

Translate with LaunchBar large

Translate with LaunchBar small

What might not be clear with the keys pressed shown on screen is that I press & hold ⌃Space to invoke LaunchBar which also brings the selected text into LaunchBar (only shows the ⌃ (CTRL) key), & I use ⌥Space to invoke Quicksilver. (For some reason ScreenFlow doesn’t show the space bar). I also use ⌘L to select the URL in Safari’s address bar before hitting ⌃Space to send it to LaunchBar when translating web pages.

Here’s how it looks at normal speed

Large

Small

Once you get used to it translating things becomes very quick & easy.

Here are the search template URLs for LaunchBar:

French to English
http://translate.google.co.uk/translate_t?hl=en&sl=fr&tl=en&q=*

Italian to English
http://translate.google.co.uk/translate_t?hl=en&sl=it&tl=en&q=*

Japanese to English
http://translate.google.co.uk/translate_t?hl=en&sl=jp&tl=en&q=*

Portuguese to English
http://translate.google.co.uk/translate_t?hl=en&sl=pt&tl=en&q=*

Spanish to English
http://translate.google.co.uk/translate_t?hl=en&sl=es&tl=en&q=*

English to French
http://translate.google.co.uk/translate_t?hl=fr&sl=en&tl=fr&q=*

English to Italian
http://translate.google.co.uk/translate_t?hl=it&sl=en&tl=it&q=*

English Japanese
http://translate.google.co.uk/translate_t?hl=jp&sl=en&tl=jp&q=*

English to Portuguese
http://translate.google.co.uk/translate_t?hl=pt&sl=en&tl=pt&q=*

English to Spanish
http://translate.google.co.uk/translate_t?hl=es&sl=en&tl=es&q=*

French web page to English
http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?u=*&sl=fr&tl=en&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Italian web page to English
http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?u=*&sl=it&tl=en&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Japanese web page to English
http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?u=*&sl=ja&tl=en&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Portuguese web page to English
http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?u=*&sl=pt&tl=en&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Spanish web page to English
http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?u=*&sl=es&tl=en&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

To add the search templates invoke LaunchBar & hit ⌘Y to open the configuration window. Click on Search Template & add new ones with the above URLs.

Any questions on how to do anything in the video let me know. It is possible to translate text using Quicksilver (not web pages though), but there’s a few more steps involved so I prefer to do it using LaunchBar. Let me know if anyone’s interested in learning how to do this with Quicksilver.

Here’s a few more Leopard folder icons I made recently.

  Downloadландшафт

When I made the Cover Flow UI mock-up for Quicksilver there wasn’t any thought in how it would actually work. It was just throwing the idea out there to see how it could look.

Cover Flow mode is up & running for Julius Eckert’s SilverFlow interface, & it’s taking a bit more thought on how to actually implement it.

For the 3 pane mode (Move To…, Copy To… etc.) here’s a mock-up of how I see it working.

Movie file selected, Open is the default action.

Tabbed to the 2nd pane, selecting ‘Move To…’ as the action.

Movies folder selected as the location to move the file to.

Here’s how it would look if you typed some text (in text mode) & the default option was Paste

And here it’s tabbed to the 2nd pane & selected Copy to Clipboard instead of Paste.

I’ve updated the Leopard folder icons.

As I made the icons months ago (using the folders from a Leopard beta) I found that the folder icons from the released version of Leopard had been tweaked slightly.

This is especially noticeable in the 16×16 versions. I’ve also increased the contrast of the in the 16×16 versions to match the standard Leopard icons more.

  Download

Julius Eckert has released his Bezel HUD UI for Quicksilver.
(This is a different version to Julius’ SilverFlow UI & Ankur’s Bezel Pro UI).

Based on the mock-ups here.

Still a few tweaks to be done but already looking excellent. Download it from Julius’ site.
(OS X 10.5 or later only).

I’ve updated the custom ‘New Tab’, ‘Stand Sidebar’ & ‘Action’ icons for SafariStand.

The Action button could do with being wider (same width as the other buttons) but that’s a limitation of SafariStand (or Safari?).

Old icons top, new versions on the bottom

Update:
They’ve now been added to the official release of SafariStand.

I made some custom Leopard folder icons for myself a few months ago, & had no intention of releasing them. But a few people have been asking me where I got them/can they have them etc.

  So here they are

Update:
The Finder folder is now being used in Default Folder X 4.
And the Tag folder will be used as the default tagged files folder in the next version of Punakea.

Since getting the new Apple Aluminium keyboard I’ve wanted to move the volume keys to F13 - F15, but haven’t been able to do it until now.

I use all of the ‘F’ keys so can’t have the volume keys set as F10 - F12. So in System Preferences I’d set it so I had to use the function key (fn) plus the ‘F’ keys to change the volume. fn+F12 to increase the volume, fn+F11 to decrease the volume etc.

Now with these scripts (for adjusting volume) I’ve assigned triggers to them from Quicksilver. I have F13 for decrease volume, F14 for mute & F15 for increase volume. It doesn’t reassign the system volume keys but it does allow you to use the other keys as well as leaving the old keyboard mappings.

I wanted to have a Time Machine button in the Finder Toolbar & be able to activate it from there.

Makes more sense to have one there & get rid of the icon in the dock to me (I usually use Quicksilver to invoke it).

Download it here (Instructions in the download)

Here are a couple of buttons I made to replace the standard Leopard ‘Get Info’ & ‘Delete’ ones.Top ones In the pic Leopard standard. Bottoms ones the new buttons. DownloadChange them with CandyBar 3