If you’re like me, there are certain software products you use every single day.  If you’re even more like me, you start to have certain ideas; ideas about how that software could be friendlier to the user. Some of these ideas are more obvious than others, but what’s truly baffling is when an already-implemented feature remains unavailable to its relevant use cases - which brings me to Google Language Tools (the lower link to the immediate right of the Google search textbox).

A few months ago, after enough assorted brilliant ideas for application and OS workflow improvements had accumulated to warrant a quick post about them  (“a short wish list”), we wrote: “wouldn’t it be cool if Google Language was smart enough to detect the source language and pre-select it (or at least make a good guess)?”
Well, Google Language Tools still doesn’t include this admittedly small but user-friendly feature.  However, it was recently pointed out to us by an astute reader that Google Translate has exactly this feature (see below). Upon further research, it turns out it’s been there since May of 2008, and the mobile Google Language page has it as well…

Google Translate is the web service-based incarnation of their Language Tools, and is designed to be “mashed” into other websites. There are still a lot more people using Google on computers than smartphones. All of which begs the question: why does this cool little feature show up on a web service where it’s arguably less needed (since the language of any given website is of course not a mystery to the publisher and remains static) - and not out there on the main Google Search/Language Tools page, where millions of us web-surfing humans are visiting sites in multiple and different source languages all the time?

A Mountain View mystery.  Meanwhile, try out the Google Translate web service below - now you can read digitalmissive in Belarusan if you want to - pretty nifty…

When we moved here to Berlin about a month ago, I was expecting - and looking forward to - experiencing all the differences, large and small, between life in the US (if the New York City area qualifies) and life here in Germany.  A lot of what I’ve come across here was entirely expected: the healthy work-to-live attitude, the not-so-healthy attitude towards smoking (the otherwise cautious and sensible Germans seem not have gotten that memo yet), the smaller personal environmental footprint, the thoroughness and competency, that inscrutable Northern European reserve - the list goes on and on…

I’ve come across some unexpected differences, too  - for one thing, I now consider New York a relatively polite place (there is a German term for “excuse me” - but I can assure you that you won’t hear it on the sidewalks or subways of Berlin - ever).

On the other hand, there are more than a few pleasant surprises to be had  here as well - and one of them is the consistently high quality of German photojournalism.  Granted, when I pick up a copy of Der Spiegel or Stern, I can’t do much other than look at the pictures (yet) - but even so, the quality, honesty, and story-telling impact of the print media photography I’ve seen here is striking.  Photojournalism here in Germany, it seems, is simply operating at a higher level than what we’re used to (or what we’ve become used to) back in the US.

A paean to the lowly magazine photograph on a technology/new media blog?  Why not - because at the end of the day, doesn’t content quality deserve at least as much mention as any technical aspects of the medium and/or the delivery platform(s) carrying that content?

So if a picture is in fact ‘worth a thousand words’, maybe it would be worth 1024 words here on digitalmissive - but even though I’m sorely tempted to grab a few of the compelling photos from the “Fotografie” sections of the Der Spiegel and Stern websites and republish them here in an effort to entice you to visit the websites yourself, you’ll just have to take my word for it: although the best shots seem to be reserved for the print editions, both publications’ sites are still well worth a visit.

Tscheuss von Berlin…