After more research I finally managed to find an existing app that’s close to Bubble Fish. It’s a Windows-only app called “Babylon”. (http://www.babylon.com/) If you have access to a Windows box, I really suggest trying it out using their free trial. It’s not bad (as Windows apps go.) It comes with some free dictionaries that are stored locally, but does have some online options, including Wikipedia.
Despite the initial deflating feeling of “Aw! It’s *kind of* been done before”, I think the existence of this app is very helpful for Bubble Fish:
1. You can get a feel for what it would be like to use Bubble Fish, and also get ideas for how it could be much better.
2. Proof of feasibility - if they can do it, it can be done. I spent a bit of space addressing the problem of grabbing the text. For text rendered in standard text boxes, Babylon has no problems. Although it’s a Windows app, I can’t help but think there must be an equivalent method on OSX, so now I’m not too worried about that potential problem. One interesting note, if the text is inside graphics or some non-standard text control, Babylon will still try to grab it, most like using OCR. However the results suck! So OCR probably doesn’t work for this application. That’s minor though since most words you will search for won’t be inside graphics.
3. Indicates probable performance
In the voting judges notes, Jason raised the concern that it would just take too long to grab results from the web. Since Babylon has a Wikipedia option, you can test that directly. On a system with standard DSL, it took Babylon 1-2 seconds to grab the Wikipedia results. It felt more than fast enough for me during my testing. Certainly way way faster than switching to a browser, and fast enough that I didn’t get annoyed at it.
Regarding selecting the appropriate data source (e.g. Spanish slang), you would still need to direct Bubble Fish as I discussed, but with a smart GUI, I think the selection process could be made fast enough to be worthwhile.
In the event that you do check out Babylon, you might ask “well, will Bubble Fish be just like that, but on a Mac?” I think the important differences (i.e. improvements) between Babylon and Bubble Fish (aside from being on a Mac) are the following:
1. Being on a Mac, Bubble Fish would be much prettier, with cool effects, possibly transparency, and whatever else the developers can think up.
2. Babylon displays the results from all of your active data sources in the same window. You can expand or contract them with the mouse. I found this incredibly annoying. I only want to see the information I’m after, and quickly. If the default data source happens to be wrong, I want to instruct Bubble Fish what to use using a few keystrokes; I don’t want to go collapsing things with the mouse.
3. I still think the real advantage of Bubble Fish is the plug-in architecture for data sources. Babylon has a lot of free dictionaries, some you can buy, and some other sources like Wikipedia. But you’re still stuck with only what they decide to provide and in their formatting. Even though Bubble Fish itself would be a commercial app, if the plug-ins were open and free, a real community could develop around it. It takes that kind of community to realize the full potential of an idea like this.
