Adding Clickable Chinese Characters, Photos and Videos
June 3, 2007 – 11:44 pm
All right. The Chinese characters are now clickable. Also, Flickr photos accompany some entries. There are also some video thumbnails at Youtube. No big deal. Easy to pull in the data using Filckr API and Youtube API. The idea is to try to provide context for entries using visual learning modes. Next, I probably need to find a way to work sound into this.
Last year, I started a project called the Pinyin Inventory Project, where users provide the Hanyu Pinyin tones on a recording to be played back to help learners with Chinese pronunciation. In fact, the Chinese flashcards developed earlier provided users a chance to drill while using the pinyin sound files. Huh? Ok…
去年, 我開始了拼音系統計劃, 用戶可利用系統上提供漢語拼音錄音訓練中文讀音。
中文拼音卡的發明, 為用戶提供一個演練機會,同時使用拼音的聲音檔案 .
Now is the premise clear? The deployment of the sound was meant to be seamless experience. In previous versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox, the amount of memory for loading the sounds was just too excessive. The hope in playing with the Quicktime and interacting with JavaScript was quite appealing, since the work could be completed for cross-platform deployment. Many things were learned during the Chinese Flashcards demonstration development:
- Safari and Firefox for Mac OS are very strict about parameter usage/limits.
- Quicktime is a smart deployment path because several users have iTunes+Quicktime installed, which removes that barrier of “Here, download this.”
(Digression: Those who developed text-to-speech or any unified messaging solution during the tech boom of the late 90’s knows exactly what I’m talking about. Pretty much every site you visited with something cool basically had the following user experience: “oh, cool. want to play this? download this. wait. wait. wait. reboot. now view. 20 seconds and its down”. End Digression) - You can build JavaScript sound into a page without tremendous fanfare
So, let’s see if I can take what I learned from that project and add sounds for pronunciation without anyone noticing.
