After a couple months of on an off again work and quite a few hours, I'm releasing a program for free that I've worked on as a hobby. I developed the program when I decided it would be nice to have one browser on top of another without having to use the windows key shortcuts. The reason I thought this would be nice, was for translating while I learn another language. I'm currently interested in learning Japanese (see Nihongo), and I've studied some Spanish in my time, but I've always had difficulties finding the time to translate foreign newspapers online. Well, this program I developed as a means to solve that problem of mine. A person can keep notes and check off the things he or she would like to read in a day. It is also possible to skin this program and even change part of the title of the program so that a teacher for instance would be able to say "Mrs. Drake's Espaņol".

As a side note, you can use this program to launch any 2 programs in the same window if you're clever enough. However, you must be aware that some things may not render quickly enough in this context.

This program uses some rather hackish work to accomplish its ends, and I'm not joking when I say I had to visit a hacker's website to figure some of this out.

Initially, I thought I could release this program Open Source, but because I'm not a lawyer, I could never really settle on a way to preserve my little "About" button if I released the source. It's a shame because I really love some of the stuff that comes out of the open source community. For example, there really is no better free decompression/compression utility for instance than PeaZip in my opinion.

I fully understand that this program may crash, or much more likely, that the browsers you load may crash as there is no kosher way that I know of for doing what I'm doing. However, SOME BROWSERS WORK MUCH BETTER THAN OTHERS. I recommend either Firefox or Internet Explorer, or even Opera (technically it doesn't allow 2 instances of itself under the same user, but I found a way to trick it). Google Chrome was downright spotty in its performance and was hit or miss depending on the version. Safari cannot have 2 running instances of itself under the same user that I'm aware of, so you should avoid it unless you want to only use the "Split Top Browser" command that I've embedded in the program, but that only works marginally, and you'll see what I mean if you use it (it doesn't actually "split" the browser per say). I don't believe Netscape worked if anyone is wondering. Derivitives of Firefox and Internet Explorer like SeaMonkey seemed to work without any problems.

The program should be largely straight forward, yet it should be noted that when you fire up this program for the first time, you will be asked to select a browser. The way that this works is you will be given a window with a button that allows you to find the default browser. This works by pulling it from the registry and works with the majority of the browsers out there. If it does not work, or if you'd like to add additional browsers, select the "Browsers" tab and click "Add New Browser...".

From here you will need to find a shortcut to your browser, the easiest way to do this generally is to find it on your desktop (which it will default to), if you don't see it on your desktop, you may have to find it another place in your hard drive, such as the installation folder for the browser in question. A technical computer person will find this a breeze, if you are not a technical computer person, you may wish to re-install your browser as this will likely create shortcuts on your desktop.
Ensure that your browser is checked in the box that says "Set as default:".

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please feel free to leave them here, or if you'd rather they be safe from prying eyes, email me at [email protected]

The skins don't yet work properly in every capacity, but the majority of it works. The single skin I made is garish I know, but that only means that you can do better =). You will need the skin I provide as a template for how to create your own. I will upload the skin for download in the next post.

Setup for Translation Made Easy:
http://www.byond.com/members/Rockinawsome/files/setup.exe