Peter Ex Texia

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

The latest version of Barra de Español is now available from addons.mozilla.org ! Those of you who already have an older version installed should see an update notification in Firefox soon, if you haven’t already.

Last night, I was working on Barra de Español and had spent quite a bit of time on Google looking for how to simulate a keypress in Firefox. It’s as simple as creating an event and dispatching it, though how to do so is not exactly intuitive. I needed to be able to do this because inserting accented characters from Barra de Español was not working in the message body textbox in Gmail and other webmail apps.

So the deadline for the Android Developer Challenge 2 has come and gone, and I did not submit an entry. It wasn’t for a lack of trying though. This was entirely a spare time project and I worked on it 3 to 5 days a week for an hour or more at a time. I’m still not comfortable going into specifics about the project because I think it’s still a viable project. I do still hope to release it to the public at some point.

I got an email today from the Mozilla Add-ons group that my add-on for Firefox, Barra de Español, has been approved to be in the public listing for Firefox add-ons! This means that it’s no longer listed as “experimental” and no longer requires that users check a box in order to install it.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

I received an email today from the Mozilla Add-ons group that Barra de Español has been approved to be in the public listing on addons.mozilla.org! This means that it no longer has the “experimental” label and can be installed without the user needing to check a box. For those of you who forgot what Barra de Español is, check out the original announcement . If you haven’t installed it yet, do so today!

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

The bold statement that is the title of this post should really read “Why You Should Be Using the US International Keyboard Layout If You are Studying Languages that Use the Roman Alphabet and Especially If You are a Software Developer,” but that makes a monster of an already long title. So keep in mind this post is not aimed at anyone studying languages that use non-Roman-derived writing systems.

I haven’t posted lately about Barra de Español or the Biblefeed Project because my free time has been split among other projects and I have not been able to return to these two for the moment. Barra de Español is still awaiting approval on addons.mozilla.org to be put in the public section, so I don’t want to make further improvements to it until that happens.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

Listening and understanding Spanish is a big weakness for me. I can read Spanish much better than I can listen to it. So, to get better at it I’ve been spending more time listening to Spanish music and podcasts. Since I last wrote about finding music you like in your language of study , I have discovered Pandora . Pandora is great because you start with an artist or multiple artists you like, and it starts playing similar artists. As you listen, you can give thumbs up or down to each song, and Pandora will adjust what it plays next based on your choices, essentially learning what you will probably like to hear. Another great thing about Pandora is that it will often play artists in your target language that are difficult to find in your home country, even stuff that I’ve found difficult to find on Amazon.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

I’m sure the question on your mind right now is: So, who won the free copy of 601 Spanish Verbs? Was it me?

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

Update: The deadline for entering the drawing has been extended, see details at the bottom of this post.