Click any text on screen to launch web browser

A desktop application that, when ALT+clicking any text or graphics text in any application on screen, will send the text to a website URL.

Example:

You're reading your email in Outlook or browsing your favorite website. Now clicking on a word, holding down the ALT-key, the application jumpstarts your favorite web browser on the URL: [login to view URL]<GRABBED WORD[S]>.

Pretty much anything visible on screen interpreted as text, should be possible to grab and redirected to any given URL.

## Deliverables

Just to be clear, this is how we want the final product to behave once installed on a workstation:

Read-mode:

1) Start your computer

2) Do the things you normally do with it

3) When you run across a word or a phrase you wish to translate or simply know more about, hold down ALT and click the word/phrase.

4) The step above launches your favorite web browser on a URL like this: [login to view URL]<CLICKED WORD/PHRASE>

5) The URL then takes over the process

Write-mode:

1) Start your computer

2) Do the things you normally do with it

3) If you want to look up a word or phrase not necessarily visible on screen, you can press ALT+T to present a window dialog screen with a search box (including logo and design)

4) When typing, a drop down list appear proposing the words that are close to your spelling or next in alphabetic order. This list comes from our servers when the application requests it. Similar to that of Google's suggestion list in their search field.

5) When hitting Enter/Submit/Lookup or choosing any of the items in the list using the arrow keys or the mouse, your favorite web browser launches on a URL like this: [login to view URL]<WRITTEN/PICKED WORD/PHRASE>

6) The search window closes

7) The URL then takes over the process

From the write-mode window dialog it should be possible to edit modifier keys, shortcut keys etc, autostart options etc (not in the task pane as described above, from there, upon clicking an icon, it should only be possible to launch the search window, see some About-info and shut down the application). I will provide screenshots for the final look and feel of this.

* * *This broadcast message was sent to all bidders on Tuesday Mar 31, 2009 6:02:56 AM:

Hi you all,

Ok, we have lots of bidders on this request and after reading through all the comments, the requirements have changed to the following as to really get to "know" the coders who can complete this efficiently and in a timely manner:

1) Read-mode:

Alt+click (or custom modifier key) functionality must be able to capture ANY standard text/font in any windows application on all flavours of Windows (win2k+ including win7).

This means, we do NOT want the application to access texts as strings from the window controls and/or edit areas using API techniques like GetCursorPos, WindowFromPoint, GetWindowRect, GetWindowText, InternalGetWindowText, SendMessage WM_GETTEXT etc.

This means that the application MUST incorporate an OCR solution as the only word-forwarding-to-browser technique in order for the application to be as complete as possible. There are lots of OCR engines out there. If it does the job, free ones are available. If it doesn't and professional licensed ones are required, then royalty free one-time-off licensed based solutions is a MUST (price must be discussed with us of course).

Please observe - as one of the bidders indicated - the use of a raw OCR engine often needs to be supported by som kind of tool that can analyse the text layout in the image. The thing here is: Once finished with this application, we will issue a new request to extend the program as to incorporate clever reading (i.e. capture words to the left and right of the clicked word as to form an expression or sentence. Note, sentences can be wrapped!)

Please have a look at Babylon which uses this technique flawlessly. Download a trial and get to know the feeling. One thing though, Babylon seems to have problems recognizing text from screen images of PDFs documents. This must work in this application as reading PDFs is a very common way of reading.

2) Misc:

It's really important that this application doesn't bloat and becomes a huge downloadable (yes, it will be distributed over the internet :)).

Futhermore, it's equally important that the need for special components / dependencies are reduced. It's ok to bundle the required components (OCR/Analysis tool etc) in the final solution of course, but under no circumstances do I want the application - when installing - to say: "Can't find [login to view URL], it is required..." or "You need to download this humongous binary with exactly this version number or otherwise your application won't start (it doesn't anyway)".

3) More misc:

The requirements for write-mode are still valid.

4) Even more misc:

We will accept bidders based on the message text provided. Thus, it's important to see your ideas of a proposed solution as to showing US you really know what you're talking about.

Simply saying "This is what I do in my sleep" doesn't quite cut it.

Looking forward to working with you!

/T

* * *This broadcast message was sent to all bidders on Tuesday Mar 31, 2009 6:56:56 AM:

Max bid amount increased to $2000.

Also, formatted my previous LONG post for clarity (see above).

Cheers,

/T

C Programming PHP

Project ID: #3403854

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