Esperanto Support Plugin for Anki
Thu, Aug 5, 2010
So I decided to learn Esperanto, which as an avid user of the SRS application Anki, meant I needed to either enter Esperanto’s special characters (ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, ŭ) into my flash cards, which can’t easily be typed with the US International keyboard layout, or I could deal with the ugly “x method” workaround (cx, gx, hx, jx, sx, ux). At first, I was only creating Esperanto cards from my Linux computers at home, which let me use an Esperanto keyboard layout to type in the special characters. Pretty soon though, I found myself creating cards from my Windows machine at work during breaks. There is no Esperanto keyboard layout in Windows by default, so I tried to install some third party keyboard layouts without success. I eventually came across a program called Ek, which seemed to do the job of letting me type special characters, except in Anki where it would only type “ĉ”. So I just dealt with the “x method” and was typing words like vojagxas instead of vojaĝas. I don’t know why, but after a while all the x’s began to really bother me. I didn’t want to see mangxi in my flash cards, it just doesn’t seem as natural as manĝi does. So I did what any other software developer would do….
Barra de Español 1.2 is now available!
Fri, Nov 20, 2009
The newest version of Barra de Español, version 1.2, is now available! See details about what’s new in this version in my post on Babelhut.com.
Simulating a keypress in Firefox
Tue, Oct 27, 2009
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.
Barra de Español has been accepted to Mozilla's public addon list
Sat, Aug 29, 2009
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.
Update: Barra de Español version 1.1 released!
Sun, Jun 7, 2009
Just a quick update to announce that Barra de Español version 1.1 has been released. For more details, see my post on babelhut.com about the release.
Barra de Español: The making of a Firefox extension
Fri, May 22, 2009
I have just released a new Firefox add-on called Barra de Español, a toolbar for those who are studying the Spanish language. It makes it easier to find definitions for words in Spanish or English, it helps you insert special characters that are specific to Spanish into any textbox in Firefox, and it provides links to native Spanish websites useful for learning the language. You may install it from addons.mozilla.org.