Polyglot 4

[uetchy]

I've been thinking about the future of Polyglot and been intrigued by the idea of bringing the app out of Safari and making it universally available in any app on macOS. Thanks to the power of Accessibility API (NSAccessibility), it might be possible. It would also introduce the major structural changes and require a lot of efforts though.

Wishlist

• Works in any app (may fixes Polyglot doesn't work with Safari Reader View Mode #18)
• Support other translation providers like DeepL or LingvaNex.
• Text to Speech
• Copy button

[gingerbeardman]

I use the DeepL app in this way and I have to say I am not a fan of their implementation. So I guess if you can improve on how they do it, go for it!

The main way I use the app is selecting text in Safari, so hopefully that would not go away?

[uetchy]

@gingerbeardman Yes, in Polyglot 4, you select any text in any app (incl. Safari and Safari Reader Mode) and hit the global shortcut to grab a translated text. It's similar to PopClip's behaviour.
In that scenario, Instant translation could be an issue because even you select the text in Terminal, there's a floating panel suddenly popped in, which is too distractive.

[gingerbeardman]

In the DeepL app you can opt-out (exclude) apps from seeing the shortcut. I'd actually prefer opt-in.

Maybe in Polyglot you can opt-in to instant translation per-app?

https://github.com/Pyroh/Fluor works similarly. You can set invocation behaviour to: global default, opt-in or opt-out.

[uetchy]

@gingerbeardman It's great idea to introduce a whitelist to control where instant translation works. Yeah I'd prefer opt-in way too.

I'd wait until macOS Big Sur comes out and see how the new Safari implements its own translation capabilities.

[gingerbeardman]

I'm still on Mojave. 🙃

[muhasturk]

should include an option to choose translation provider like google, bing, yandex etc.