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Russ Key

Hi everyone. This is my first FireFox extension so I hope to learn more about XUL, JS, CSS, DOM and other technologies used for writing extensions as I develop it. It looks like this is also a good time for me to learn the w3c compliant XHTML.

The Russian speakers will notice the word-play on the extension name. 'RussKey' in Russian sounds like 'Russkij', which actually means 'Russian'.

Short-term goals for the Russ Key extension

• Allow the users to type in TextArea and Text HTML fields in Russian without having the russian keyboard installed. Use phonetic keyboard layout for typing, so English 'A' will correspond to Russian 'A' on the keyboard. - Released in versions starting from 0.1
• Allow the users to transform 'translit' text into normal Cyrillic to avoid the headache of reading Russian words typed with Latin (English) letters. - Released in versions starting from 0.2
• Provide the same functionality of Russ Key extension in Thunderbird. - Released in versions starting from 0.4
• Now supporting FireFox1.5. - Released in versions starting from 1.0.0
• Now supporting IFrame in designMode (this is used in GMAIL for example.) - Released in versions starting from 1.1.0
• Now supporting ThunderBird in compose message window. - Released in versions starting from 1.2.0
• Better TB support, new user menu, splitting functionality of keyboard-toggling and translit transformation into two menu items, support for simultaneous multiple edit fields in the same window. - Released in versions starting from 1.3.0
• Supports English to Russian and Russian to English translations via altavista. - Released in versions starting from 1.3.1
• Supports 'In Progress' status icon, asynchronous language translations, fixes ThunderBird status bar icons. - Released in versions starting from 1.4.0
• Supports 3 translators and a working round-robin fail-over mechanism. - Released in versions starting from 1.4.4
• Allows user to define shortcut keys via settings dialog. - Released in versions starting from 1.4.5
• Supports edit field background color change, adds 'SAVED' status to the settings dialog. - Released in versions starting from 1.4.6
• Allows the user to remove the status-bar icon, has update version counter, only tries to update twice for every 100 opened windows. - Released in versions starting from 1.4.9

Here are some of the long-term goals that I hope to achieve once I understand the extension technology better

• Provide capability to import different keyboard layout maps (thus allowing users to remap the keyboard with different key layouts.) Provide capability to import different alphabetic language unicode maps, so that at some point Russ Key extension could be reused for typing in languages other than Russian. Ukrainian comes to mind, or even Farsi. - Released in versions starting from 0.3
• Provide capability to remap the keyboard layout, and export the new layout maps.
• Provide capability to transform translit not only for the Russian language but for other alphabetic languages as well.
• Provide capability for the user to view the current layout map while typing, so that it would be easy to see where the different letters are located. This can be done as either a frame in the browser, or a floating DIV or something.
• Allow users to translate text from russian to other languages and from other languages to russian by selecting text on the page and asking the extension for a translation. The translated text will be pasted instead of the original text into the browser. - Released in versions starting from 1.3.1
• Allow users to select their own keyboard shortcut. - Released in versions starting from 1.4.5
• Allow users to select between different transliteration maps from submenu. (This means adding a submenue to the main context Russ Key menu item and adding a list of available transliteration mappings.)
• Allow typing complex Russian letters by typing English letter combinations.

Enough for now.

Here you can add your comments, ask me questions. I will monitor the activity in the forum so please, do not abuse, or the forum will have to be deactivated. No ads please, no excessive swearing, no offtopic discussions.