Barra de Español: A new Firefox toolbar for Spanish students
By Peter on May 22, 2009 in Barra de Español
Ladies and gentlemen, Spanish students across the globe, I’d like to introduce you to my latest creation! It’s a Firefox add-on called Barra de Español. It lets find word translations and definitions using wordreference.com by typing the word in the toolbar, or by highlighting the word and right-clicking on it. It helps insert the special characters that Spanish uses that may not be on your keyboard. It provides links to native Spanish web sites which can help you in your study of the language, including news, reference, and video sites. But the best part is that it’s free!
Phew! I’m done with the sales pitch now. Seriously though, check it out. You can download it from addons.mozilla.org. It’s currently considered “experimental” on their site so you have to check a little box that says that yes, you really want to install this. Don’t worry though, I’ve tested it thoroughly and I use it myself daily. It is definitely release-quality, and hopefully the reviewers at Mozilla will upgrade the add-on from its experimental status shortly.
Why would I create such a thing? Well, why wouldn’t I? I’m studying Spanish and I know how to program a computer. The natural conclusion is that I would write this, right? The truth is, I didn’t think of it until I saw this article on Tofugu.com talking about a Japanese toolbar. I began to wonder why all the cool Japanese studying kids got the cool tools, but I had nothing like that to help me with my Spanish studies. I think this shows that jealousy is not always a bad thing.
If you interested in more details about the creation of Barra de Español, I wrote about the process on my personal blog. Also, I want to thank Ramses from spanish-only.com for checking my Spanish on the project site.
So what are you waiting for? Try it out, and then leave a comment to let me know what you think about it!
Related posts:
- Barra de Español is now in the Public list on addons.mozilla.org
- Update: Barra de Español version 1.1 has been released
- Barra de Español 1.2 is now available!
- Ramses launches the Spanish-English Sentence Database
- Frases en Español: Mobile Phone
I’m looking forward to using it in a couple of years! (When I finally get up to a decent level in Korean and can move onto my first non-Asian foreign language)
Alex | May 22, 2009 | Reply
Cool, I’ll definitely use it. Though there already was WR search engine available at http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-engines.html?name=wordreference.
Few development suggestions, if I may. It’d be cool to have same kinde of popup as perapera-kun/rikaica instead of loading new page. Also it’d be useful to be able to hide/show toolbar with hotkey so that in times when it is not needed one can hide it and reclaim space it takes up.
Anyway, nice to see someone developing something for Spanish learners :)
aabram | May 22, 2009 | Reply
@Alex: Funny you mention it, but I had the same feeling. If I ever get good at both Japanese and Thai, I think Spanish would be my next target.
thomas | May 22, 2009 | Reply
@aabram: I originally was going to make it popup like that but it is technically more difficult to do. That doesn’t mean I won’t eventually do it, but I wanted to get something working sooner rather than later.
While there’s no hotkey to show/hide the toolbar, you can show/hide by right-clicking on Firefox’s toolbar.
I’ll add your suggestions to my to-do list though, thanks!
peter | May 22, 2009 | Reply