Fig 1.0 Highlight a word to make the static blue, square, icon appear.
Fig 1.1 Left click on the static blue, square, icon to bring up its Options menu.
| INTERNET EXPLORER 8 ACCELERATORS |
With the arrival of Internet Explorer 8 comes the Accelerator - The act of highlighting some text on a webpage and then
invoking an online services for it. This means that it now possible to highlight the English word CLOCK for example,
within a webpage, and then use IE8's built-in Translator accelerator to find out what the equivalent word is in Spanish
(Reloj) or French (Horloge) for example.
IE8 comes with five main accelerators built-in. The Translator accelerator as explained above. The Windows Live Search
accelerator that searches Windows Live for your highlighted text. The Blog accelerator that allows you to interact with
the blog on your Windows Live Space in order to create a blog entry for your highlighted text. The Map accelerator that
allows you to search Windows Live Search (Microsoft's Virtual Earth) for a map relating to your highlighted text (i.e.
highlight LONDON to search for the LONDON map). And the E-Mail accelerator that creates a Windows Live/Hotmail e-mail
for you with your highlighted text as the e-mail message.
In this first example I will show you how to use the Translator accelerator. So begin by highlighting a word, in this example the word CLOCK. Doing so will make a static blue, square, icon appear on the webpage (Fig 1.0 below). Clicking on it with the left mouse button will bring up its Options menu (Fig 1.1).
After clicking on the static blue, square, icon hover over its menu-items until you reach the TRANSLATOR menu-item. DO NOT CLICK on that menu-item at this time. Just hover over it for a second or so to make the Translator window appear. From that window you can change the language used for translation - Click on the CHANGE LANGUAGE link, underneath the Arabic - English heading (Fig 1.1 above) for the langauge possibilities (Fig 1.2 below). In this example I have chosen (clicked on) English - Spanish to have the English word CLOCK translated into Spanish, translated as RELOJ (Fig 1.3 below).
The reason for not clicking on the TRANSLATOR menu-item, above, is because that would of connected you to the Windows
Live TRANSLATOR webpage (via a newly opened TAB). The true idea of an accelerator is that you do not leave the webpage
you are on. However. Going to the Windows Live TRANSLATOR webpage (via a newly opened TAB), and therefore leaving the
webpage you are on, is not a bad thing because the translator webpage is automatically filled with your highlighted word.
So if you highlighted a whole paragraph, ready for translation, clicking on the TRANSLATOR menu-item is not such a bad
thing. You still have to choose a language to translate into though from the Windows Live TRANSLATOR webpage.
In this next example I have highlighted the word LONDON and then hovered over the MAP WITH LIVE SEARCH menu-item to
display a road map of London. If I had clicked on the MAP WITH LIVE SEARCH menu-item I would of been taken to the
Windows Live Search MAPS webpage with the road map of London displayed on a larger scale.
| DOWNLOAD MORE ACCELERATORS |
So far only the IE8 Accelerators have been mentioned simply because they are the built-in accelerators, and mainly use
the Windows Live services. However. There are more accelerators out there. Sticking with the Translator accelerator, in
this next example I am going to show you how to download the infamous BabelFish Translator accelerator.
Begin by highlighting any word and then click on the static blue, square, icon to bring up the Options menu. From there.
Hover over the ALL ACCELERATORS sub-menu, until its sub-menu menu-items appear, and then select the FIND MORE ACCELERATORS
sub-menu menu-item.
Clicking on the FIND MORE ACCELERATORS sub-menu menu-item (Fig 2.0 above) connects you to the Internet Explorer Add-Ons
website (Fig 2.1 above) where you can then download more accelerators for Internet Explorer 8. This is a general
add-ons webpage, for internet explorer in general, but to find accelerators specific to IE8 scroll down the add-ons
webpage until you see on the left-hand-side the heading INTERNET EXPLORER 8 ONLY. Under the ACCELERATORS link click on
the TRANSLATE link to continue.
The TRANSLATE link takes you to the Translator accelerators webpage where you should see the Translate With Babelfish
accelerator. Click on its ADD TO INTERNET EXPLORER button to continue. Doing so will bring up an ADD ACCELERATOR
message requester (Fig 2.3 below) whereby you just need to click on its ADD button to install the accelerator.
Before you click on the ADD button, of the above ADD ACCELERATOR message requester, you might want to put a tick next to its MAKE THIS MY DEFAULT PROVIDER FOR THIS ACCELERATOR CATEGORY option. This will make Babelfish your default (normally used) Translator accelerator and not the Windows Live Translator accelerator.
| MANAGE ACCELERATORS |
To manage your accelerators, which are Internet Explorer 8 Add-Ons at the end of the day, hover over the ALL ACCELERATORS sub-menu and then click on the MANAGE ACCELERATORS sub-menu menu-item. This will open internet explorer's normal Manage Add-Ons window, also available via the TOOLS menu, with the Accelerators Add-On Type selected (Fig 3.1 below).
With the Manage Add-Ons (Manage Accelerators) window open, under the add-on type of Accelerators, select the accelerator you wish to manage (operate on). In this example I have selected the Babelfish Translator accelerator. From here I could DISABLE it, REMOVE it AS the DEFAULT accelerator or simply REMOVE it completely (uninstall it).
Microsoft product screen shot(s) reprinted with permission from Microsoft Corporation. As stated here by the Microsoft Corporation.
