Pinyin Dashboard Widget
May 14th, 2008 by MarkMuninn has made my Pinyin Tone Tool into something more useful– an OS X dashboard widget!
I’m happy to announce the results of a few hours of tinkering: The Pinyin Tone Widget. This OS X dashboard widget will take a series of Chinese pinyin words with tone numbers appended at the end of each syllable and will add the tone marks where appropriate (e.g. zhong1guo2 becomes zhōngguó).
Get it while it’s hot.
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May 14th, 2008 at 9:20 am
That’s awesome! I was going to say I wish there was a Firefox add-on like that when I noticed your comment on the other page. For now, I’m just lazy and stick with numbers when I need to type pinyin.
By the way, glad to see you’re back to posting more recently!
May 14th, 2008 at 8:17 pm
Having been using a Mac the last 4 months, I’m coming to appreciate these types of programs (for example, I modified one to change key mappings in Firefox for Mac). Out of the box, I think Mac is the most developer friendly operating system out there. OS X comes with Xcode, which is a full-featured IDE that makes development rapid. OS X also has one of the richest APIs for developers to hook into the operating system.
Windows doesn’t give you anything out-of-the-box for development — you have to go buy Visual Studio if you stay with the Microsoft solution. Most Linux distributions do offer some descent tools, like Kdevelop, but these aren’t as polished as Mac’s Xcode. Apple really cares about its developers and wants people to enjoy making Widgets and Gadgets, which in turn makes using a Mac more pleasant.
BTW, John P shared a link to a graph showing that UTF-8 just recently became the most common character set on the web, passing US ASCII and European 8859-1/1252. At this rate UTF-8 will be used in over half of all webpages by the end of 2010, and be the only text encoding by 2015. If the Pinyin tool uses UTF-8, then it should be in good shape!