I guess you guys all know by now that Microsoft reveled the new IE8 during the Mix '08 conference, and also released the Beta bits for download (the XP version can be found @ http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=1A2E3DDD-B38B-439D-BBA7-F179A5D3ECAF&displaylang=en). I must confess I haven't had time to fully explore what's new, but I can talk about one REALLY cool feature called Activities. Activities are metadata driven extensions open to developers. Alright, I'm starting to sound like a Product Manager, so let's try this again: think about a way you could tell IE what to do when you highlight some text, hover over some link of simply right-click on a page. Now assume that instead of writing code to do that, you could instead put the instructions together in a XML file that would then be used to re-configure IE. Also, assume that you could then deploy this XML to any computer you want, and use a little Javascript snippet to allow users to import it themselves. That's how flexible Activities are...

Our team was selected to ship one of the standard activities 9the ones ypu get out of the box with IE 8) - a translation activity, of course. With IE 8 you can now translate selected text, translate the whole page or even point to a link and translate the corresponding target! It couldn't be easier, really... Just right-click and select 'Translate with Windows Live' from the menu.

Here's a quick summary of each feature:

• Translate Selected Text - Preview: you can preview the translation by selecting the text and hovering over the menu option (without clicking it). After a while a small window will appear, close to the menu item:

You can chance the language directly from the Preview window clicking 'Change Language' (duh!).

• Translate Selected Text - Execute: If you click on the menu item instead of hovering over, you'll be taken to the Translator main page, and all fields will be properly populated:

Note that the Url text box is pre-populated with the page you were browsing before, so if you decide to translate the whole page all you have to do is click the button ;-).

• Translate the whole page - Execute: without selecting any text, right-click anywhere in the page and click on the menu item. You will invoke the BilingualViewer interface, and the page will start to get translated
• Translate Links - Execute: select a hyperlink, right click to invoke the menu and click on 'Translate with Windows Live'. You will invoke the BilingualViewer interface, and the hyperlink target page will start to get translated
• Translate the whole page/Translate Links - Preview: the preview feature will only allow you to change the language selection. Hovering over the menu item you will see this:

This is pretty exciting news for us. It basically means that everyone with the new browser can have instant access to our translation services! We couldn't ask more in terms of getting more traffic, could we?

You can find more the new IE 8 features @ On10 - http://www.on10.net/blogs/larry/First-Look-Internet-Explorer-8/ 

Another cool feature brought you by "the little team that ships" - Microsoft Research Machine Translation (MSR-MT) !!!

Enjoy...

Bom, voces ja' devem saber que a Microsoft lancou a nova versao do Internet Explorer (IE 8) na conferecia Mix'08 a algumas semanas atras. Eu coloquei o link pra versao XP no blog acima, para quem quizer testar o Beta. Ainda nao tive tempo de entender todas as novidades, mas posso falar com seguranca a respeito de uma das varias features novas: as atividades de traducao. Com IE8 voce agora pode traduzir um texto selectionado, traduzir uma pagina inteira ou traduzir a pagina de um link com um simples click do mouse!

As novas atividades de traducao sao ativadas a partir do menu do right-click do mouse. Eu copiei varias telas no blog em Ingles que devem ser auto-explicativas - a unica opcao menos intuitiva e' a funcao 'Preview' que permite uma traducao super-rapida de um texto selecionado: basta selecionar o texto, usar o right-click e deixar o ponteiro do mouse sobre a opcao do menu (sem clicar). Depois de alguns segundo, uma janelinha ira' aparecer com o texto traduzido para o idioma que foi selecionado na ultima operacao do tradutor. Para trocar o idioma basta clicar em 'Change Language' (ou 'Alterar Idioma' :-) ).

As atividades sao hyper uteis e muito facil de usar. Acho que o trafego para nosso sistema vai aumentar horrores - basta pensar que agora todo usuario do IE8 tem a chance de disparar traducoes com um clique!

O time esta' de parabens - a feature ficou muito legal... E sai da frente que tem mais inovacao acontecendo em breve... E' so' aguardar!

Abracos