Author Archives: John Yunker

An iPhone game that I still haven’t won

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y-tiles

I’m not very patient with games. Which is probably why I’m not very good.

My brother has concocted a tile puzzle game for the iPhone, shown below, that I still haven’t figured out — even at the easiest setting.

Maybe you’ll have better luck than I’ve had. The good news is that Chris has made it available for free here.

y-tiles2

What I really like about the app is that you can use your own photos. I thought that my pics would be easier to unscramble than the default pics.

They weren’t.

For anyone out there looking for a great developer — proficient on both the iPhone and the PC — you can contact Chris at  chris@chrisyunker.com.

How many TLDs are there?

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I love this visual, via ICANN, a diagram of the world’s top-level domains (TLDs) — all 280 of them.

all_domains_icann

The overwhelming majority of TLDs are country codes, most of which are included in the poster I published about a year ago.

Looking ahead, I would expect the “g” domains to multiply in number. These generic TLDs include domains such as .biz and .info. ICANN recently opened a call for applications to open gTLDs for governments and corporations.

New gTLDs could include “.coke” and “.paris.” It remains to be seen if companies are willing to put up the cash to get these domains, but I’m fairly certain a good many will.

But for now at least the total number of TLDs stands at 280.

Google Translate now in 41 languages

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Google marches ahead with its machine translation engine, adding Turkish, Thai, Hungarian, Estonian, Albanian, Maltese, and Galician.

This time last year, Google supported a mere 13 languages, which was in itself not bad.

But I particularly like the minor tweaks made to the site’s interface. As shown below, you can now click on your language to make it one half of a language pair — a welcome alternative to the pull-down menu, which continues to grow.

google_translate_09

What I would like to see — and I suspect is less than a year away — is the ability to simply enter a URL and have Google auto-translate that Web site into your language without you having to specify your language. Google should already know this based on your locale setting — or at least let you set that preference ahead of time.

Google Translate can auto-detect the language for you right now — but you have to ask it to do that. Perhaps the processing overhead is such that Google doesn’t want to turn on this feature by default.

So, will Google support 70 or so languages a year from now? I doubt it, given the current economic climate. As Google notes on its blog, these 41 languages already address 98% of all Internet users. I assume that Google will focus less on language expansion and more on integrating Google Translate into its products as well as improving the UI.