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Friday, July 16, 2010

Converter – the Firefox extension

The Converter now available as a widget!

The Converter is also available as an embeddable widget—provide your readers with the same convenience you've come to appreciate! Works with all major browsers, requires one line of HTML.

About the Converter

The Converter is the contextual unit converter, currency converter and timezone converter for Firefox — experience the web with familiar metrics!

The Converter is a no-thrills tool. It aims to be intuitive for the average user during regular text reading. You can't specify the precision. You can't tweak the resulting units. You don't get the results in several formats. If you need any of that fancy stuff for scientific purposes you should probably use another tool.

Converter 0.9.9 RC2 available now @ http://sp2.ro/cnv099RC2 -- as always, please report bugs along with the release version. 38 days ago
Feeling brave? Check out Converter 0.9.9 RC1 @ http://sp2.ro/cnv099RC1 -- and if you find bugs, please report them AND the release version. 85 days ago
Sorry to all the people who send feedback which I'm not responding to -- I am reading it all, and the best ideas will make it in production. 154 days ago
The Edget code is now auto-minified. Size dropped from 81 KiB (uncompressed) to 22 KiB (compressed), to 12 KiB (minified). Bumped to alpha. 229 days ago

→ follow the Converter on Twitter

How it works

The operation is as simple as possible, and it works in three distinct ways:

Single conversion on selection: Select a piece of text containing a measurement and right click: the converted value will be shown in the resulting pop-up menu.
Page conversion: Left-click on the Converter icon in the bottom-right corner: all measurements in the current web page are converted.
Custom conversions: Right-click on the Converter icon in the bottom-right corner, and choose "Custom conversion"—this way you can even convert offline measurements!

Check it out: install the Converter, and after restarting the browser select this entire paragraph and right click: 0.1 in = 2.54 mm is shown in the popup menu (that's because "0.1 in" is the first dimension encountered in this paragraph).

Features

Here's a comprehensive list of the Converter's main features:

Large number of units and formats: Take a look at the examples page for a quick overview of the formats and units the Converter currently understands. Even more units will be supported in future versions.
Small footprint: in spite of the relatively large assortment of units supported by the Converter, the final package is no larger than a few kilobytes.
Fast, smart, intuitive operation: Since this tool aims at day-to-day, contextual operation, it performs quite a few tricks to come in handy with as little hassle as possible: