Don's Pages and my Music

Friday, July 16, 2010

Converter for Firefox provides instant unit conversion

Converter for Firefox provides instant unit conversion

converter

Converter is an old, mature Firefox add-on that provides solid unit conversions. When I say "old," I mean that version 0.1 alpha was released in 2004 – it actually preceded Firefox v1.0.

The latest version was released on December 5, 2009. I'm not sure if development is still ongoing or not, but to be honest, I am not sure what remains to be added to this Swiss Army unit conversion tool.

Converter has two main modes. One mode is context-sensitive, so you select a chunk of text on the page and right-click. Converter then extracts a measurement from that text and displays the conversion in the context menu. So, if your text says something like "The device costs 150 USD and is easy on the eyes," you can just select the whole sentence and see what "150 USD" is in your own currency.

However, if the text says "$150," you will not see the conversion. That's a problem, but I can see why the tool works like this; the dollar sign ($) does not necessarily mean USD. This only happens with this particular symbol, though; if the text says, "the box is 3" wide," Converter works just fine.

The second mode is a more conventional two-field dialog; you enter your text at the top and hit Enter, and then you get a conversion at the bottom. All in all, it's a very useful little add-on, especially if you don't like googling every arcane measure that you come across.


Go there Read more Great Articles...
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2010/07/16/converter-for-firefox-provides-instant-unit-conversion/

Don

No comments:

Post a Comment