Comment by dhx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dhx | Hacker News Reader

Global offline maps including public transport routing and timetables is a fantastic (and if I'm not mistaken, also unique) feature. Google Maps' offline feature by contrast doesn't work globally (some areas are excluded), doesn't include public transport, etc.

Keeping in that same theme--I've love to see Mozilla Translations models (or similar) integrated in GNOME apps where it makes sense to do so--such as Document Viewer, for good-enough offline text translation built into every GNOME environment.

Such features are highly user visible and set GNOME apart from competition in ways that are easy to describe to anyone. No EULAs, no data sovereignty concerns, no dark patterns--just features ready to go for users out-of-the-box that are incredibly useful, user-friendly and consistent.

In saying that--there's of course all the great GNOME stuff under the hood for geeks too--support for almost every audio and video format to have ever existed easily enabled, glycin, sandboxing of applications, easy and consistent software package management for everything (now with obsolescence management built in too)...etc.

Sound like something to propose on their Gitlab, you seem to have thought it through!

I would personally very appreciate this, after having enjoyed similar functionality on MacOS, with easy dictionary access and text translation.

Some feature requests have already been raised previously:

epiphany: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/epiphany/-/work_items/2889

papers: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/papers/-/work_items/454

gnome-text-editor: doesn't accept feature requests directly, wants them raised instead at https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/whiteboards/-/work_ite... (no previous translation concepts found)

Translation within these apps is generally not an easy feature to implement. Do you automatically try and detect the language and suggest a translation? Do you make language translation controls obvious and put them front and centre, or hide them away assuming they're infrequently used? Do you show translations side-by-side, line-under-line, or just replace the original text with translated text? Then on more complex matters such as papers, do you try and preserve original formatting (very hard, particularly for things like tables), do you accommodate words split across lines, etc.

There does exist https://flathub.org/en/apps/dev.ters.LocalTranslate as a standalone offline text translation application for GNOME desktop environments but a user would have to copy+paste text between applications to use it.

Well, on macOS it's part of the system's right click facility, it takes selected text and the looks it up in dictionary or translates.

Adding support to individual apps is specifically something that ruins good UX. You want all apps enjoy it independently.

I wasn't thinking of the UI being "highlight text -> context menu -> translate", rather, one of:

1. Open bonjour.md and a banner automatically appears above the document asking whether you'd like to translate from French -> German (assuming the desktop environment language was set to German). This is more or less how Firefox handles offline translation of web pages.

2. Open bonjour.md and click a translate button, then get asked which language pair to choose from.

I can however see how the "highlight text -> context menu -> translate" UI pattern may make sense in multi-language settings, such as a chat room, or web browser where text in multiple language may be presented on the same page. For a terminal session however, it may be better to require the user to pipe text to a translation command line utility where possible--but there are exceptions to this too such as ncurses interfaces.

Wow Maps is cool, I had no idea this was on my computer.

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