Filed under: Office, Web services, Google

Google Translate already provided tools that let users translate snippets of text or entire web pages by entering a URL and choosing the source and output languages. Now you can also upload documents to translate.

Google quietly added the option sometime int he last few days. there’s not a ton of information about the new feature available, but it appears to handle TXT, HTML, XLS, PDF, DOC, and PDF files reasonably well. It choked on an OpenOffice Sheet ODS file I tried to upload.

The results are spit out in HTML format, so if you upload a spreadsheet you won’t get a translated, downloadable spreadsheet in return. Instead you’ll get an HTML table. But this isn’t a bad start. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google eventually adds the ability to open translated documents in Google Docs.

[via Google Operating System]

Google Translate now handles uploaded documents originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 10 Jul 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google Translate now handles uploaded documents originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on July 10, 2009.

Filed under: Design, Security, Web

Password masking – the practice of replacing the characters a user types into password entry field with bullets – has been widespread on the web for a long time. Jakob Nielsen recently wrote a thought-provoking post suggesting masking is hurting more than it helps, and that it’s only being kept around out of habit. I’ll try to make the case for and against masking here, and let Download Squad readers weigh in on the subject.

Down With Masking:

Masking ruins the user experience. When users can’t see what they’re typing, they’re likely to make mistakes and second-guess themselves. Did I forget my password, or did I just make a typo? After enough login failures, they’ll either stop using your site or call support. As a result, users try to get around the problems of masking by entering a simple, insecure password, or by copying and pasting their passwords in. Why are we continuing a practice that undermines user security and adds uncertainty to the user experience? Masking has got to go.

Masking Forever:

Masking doesn’t make users feel insecure, it makes them feel more secure. It was instituted for a reason: to keep someone who might be reading over your shoulder from reading your password. Maybe this has become less of a concern over the years, but masking has picked up some new, equally important uses, too. What if you’re screensharing with a coworker or recording a screencast that happens to include your site’s login process? Users have come to expect masking. When they run into the rare site that doesn’t use it, they get nervous that their password might be sent unencrypted. Part of good design is giving users what they expect, so keep giving them password masking.

So, readers, what do you think? Take the poll, and let me know in the comments if you’ve got better arguments for or against.

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Password Masking: love it or leave it? originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 27 Jun 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Password Masking: love it or leave it? originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on June 28, 2009.

UIF, didn’t that die?

Well, thanks to this post at Life Rocks 2.0, I converted the UIF file to the standard ISO format!

UIF (Universal Image Format) is an image compression format developed by Magic ISO. Universal Image Format(UIF) is a powerful compression image file format for backing up CD/DVD. It is fast, reliable, and has rich set of features which include password-protected, data encryption, MD5 checksum support and much more. UIF format is available for Windows and if you are using Linux/Ubuntu, you need to convert UIF to ISO format.

How to Convert UIF to ISO Format

You can convert UIF files to ISO using the freeware application UIF2ISO by Luigi Auriemma’s for Linux. This is a command line convertor for changing file type UIF to ISO format.

1. First Step is to install install zlib and OpenSSL with apt-get.

sudo apt-get install zlib1g zlib1g-dev libssl-dev build-essential

2. Second step is to download the freeware from the authors site.

wget http://aluigi.altervista.org/mytoolz/uif2iso.zip

3. Once the file is downloaded we need to unzip it.

unzip uif2iso.zip

cd src

4. Create the executable by compiling the code.

make

sudo make install

5. To Convert the files from UIF to ISO format, use this command

uif2iso example.uif output.iso

Here example.uif is the file to be converted and output.iso is the output file.

UIF in Linux originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on June 3, 2009.

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