Pop-up Chinese Annotator for Chrome at last!
I’m stunned how long it took for someone to come up with a Chrome extension that worked like the ones available on Firefox. Unfortunately the various third party global pop-up annotators (which work on text in all apps) were not compatible with Chrome, I’m guessing the way it rendered text wasn’t using a standard Windows API they hooked into. Anyway, a chap called cschiller13579 has created one simply called Zhongwen and it works pretty much exactly as you want it to. Thank Christ for that!
In case you run into the same problem I did, it has to be enabled by selecting an icon on the top right of the browser. This turned out to be actually invisible for me, although when it’s on you can see “on”. Also it doesn’t seem possible to enable it from a Chrome window without navigation (like if you take your gmail and create application shortcuts for example), but if you enable it in one Chrome instance then it seems all subsequently newly created Chrome windows will have it enabled by default. It’s a app on the scene but by golly it’s been sorely missed!
P.S. In other news Pleco on the iPhone now beta testing flash-card support is seriously amazing. More later.
Hi Mat, I released a new version of the extension. It should solve your problem with the “invisible” icon.
The icon was probably invisible for you because you might be using a theme with a dark background. I put a white background behind the icon, so now you should be able to see it. Just install the new version from the Google Chrome extensions gallery.
Enjoy!
Hey Chris, for posterity I thought I’d point out to the 8 people that read my blog that your 0.8 now has the icon sorted, the weird characters not working bug fixed and the tone colours optionally disabled (yay!). Thanks pal, the Chinese scene makes me teary-eyed sometimes
Great extension but it still doesn’t work in some normal situations. For example, go to google.cn and hover over the 中 in 中文网页 just below the Google button.
The bug you noticed is actually due to a bug in Chrome. It happens only rarely, though. Hopefully, it will go away in one of the future Chrome releases.
Hey Chris, what’s the story with text areas. Is it possible to work in those?
Hi Matt, unfortunately text areas are still a problem. Chrome doesn’t provide my extension with the data it needs to do the translation . This also affects other popup translators for Chrome. I’ll implement this as soon as I figure out a way to do it. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Hi Mat,
in the comment section of the Zhongwen download page you mentioned that you’re having some problems with the latest version (2.0). Could you send me an email with more details? I cannot reproduce these problems, so it would be great if you could help me track down the source of these issues so I can fix them.
Thanks!