what a nice idea David. I wonder if in the future, you could allow the user to position the browse mode cursor on some price, and have him hit a hotkey and have the app automatically speak the conversion to his local currency? Maybe it could be set to remember url domains or individual pages and what currency they price their items in? I see all kinds of work for you ahead!!! <smile> Chip
_____ From: David [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, September 10, 2011 2:33 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Currency Calculator - Alpha-testers, was: What is the best way to store a dictionary? Chip and Jared, Sorry for not being specific about this. My problem did arise, because the user might interfere, or change these values from time to time. In other words, they are not ever-static. But they need to be stored in the modified version, so that this will be the value that is being retrieved next time the app is run. Anyway, thanks for all help. The first Alpha version of my app should be quite ready. Simple as it may be. I might need a couple of testers, though. So, let me just explain shortly what the app is doing. For all of us, who are shopping online, and who like to buy from abroad, there is an ever ongoing challenge of calculating what a given price - in a foreign currency - actually will sum up to in your local currency. If for instance, you live in the US, and buy a lot of stuff from Canada, that is priced in Canadian dollars, you will have to keep calculating the actual price in US Dollars, so as to see if it is worth to buy from abroad. Not a big deal. If the Currency Exchange Rate is 1.03, You can always bring up the calculator of Windows, and enter the US * 1.03. But when you are operating with several currencies, since you are buying stuff from different parts of the world (like if you are shopping places like EBay), it becomes a bit more of a challenge. You then will keep remembering what the Exchange rate is for British Pounds, Canadian dollars, and Australian dollars, along with Euros. My small app - for the moment called CCalc - will keep remembering the actual exchange rate for each currency. The user can easily change - or update - the rate for a given currency, or have the app displaying what the stored rate is. First he has entered the rate for a currency, he can enter things like: CN59.23 And if the Exchange Rate is set to 1.03, he will get the result 61.01 spoken. Again, he could have entered things like £10.92 for getting the exchanged sum of a buying in British Pounds, and have the final sum spoken. Entering things like AU=1.24 will set the Exchange Rate for Australian dollars to 1.24. This might explain why I needed to store the values, but eventually have a chance to update the values, depending on a user input. At last, if the user wants to know what the stored rate is for a given currency, he would enter things like: ?NOK (That is the currency text, along with a question mark), and here get the rate for the Norwegian Krone. There is a few minor limitations, the way the app stands today. These will be sorted soon as I can get my hands and time on it. But if anyone has the interest of testing the app, please contact me at [email protected] . Thanks again for all assistance. ----- Original Message ----- From: Chip <mailto:[email protected]> Orange To: [email protected] Sent: Saturday, September 10, 2011 3:37 AM Subject: RE: What is the best way to store a dictionary? Hi David, you don't really say if your app will need to update these values (say for instance because of something the user does), or if they are not ever changing, so you only need to display/speak them to the user? If you only need to display them to the user, then the XML file is perfect for this; there's no problem in adding as many strings as you like; any other code in your app generated by the WEScripting Framework or anything else will just ignore them, and as you say, you can internationalize it very easily. If you do need to change them, but you only have say a hundred or two, then a .ini file will do fine. yes, you can put numbers or strings in .ini keys. You could for instance have each .ini entry consist of the string value equals and it's associated number. (such as USA=1.02). hth, Chip _____ From: David [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, September 09, 2011 5:05 PM To: [email protected] Subject: What is the best way to store a dictionary? Obviously I don't know much about storing things, from a script. Smile. My problem is, that I need to store information, holding two 'columns'. I thought at first of using a dictionary. Secondly I was considering the usage of the app's INI file. But I am really not sure any longer, what would be the way to handle this the most smart. Thing is that I need to store info like: Australia 6.5 USA 5.55 Denmark 1.0398 Europe 9.02 As you can see, I will need a set of 'keys', with textual names. These has to go along with a corresponding set of decimal numbers. As I said, I was considering using the INI file. But somehow, I got it from the reference manual of WE, that you only can store integers for the INI file. Is that so, or am I messing up my mind here. I then thought of using the XML file, and store a set of strings there. But these would have to be seperate from other strings in the XML file, or how would my app distinguish them from strings of more general kind in my XML file. Is there a way of 'grouping' strings in the XML? The benefit of the XML, of course, would have been that I could have translated the textual keys into each languge supported; of which there would be no way in the INI file. But it is not a too big problem, since the info the user really would need to get in touch with here, is the set of decimal values; hence he might not care too much of the textual notation. Any good workaround for my issue? Thanks,
