Seriously…neeeeeds to leave the menubar!!

So I first reviewed this app about two years ago when it came out, and I can’t believe I’m still writing about the same glaring issue; it *only* lives in the menubar. This is a big issue for those of us with small screened Macs, as our menubars can get way too crowded. However, it also means that you can only paste so much text in its tiny pop-down window, making it a problem for power users who need to paste a lot of text. Even their iPad app lets you paste more text than this one. Plus, having it not in the dock is less convenient when switching between open windows (if using, say, Mission Control), and clearly confuses some users when they click the iTranslate app icon in Launchpad and seemingly nothing happens when they don’t notice a new icon being added to their menubar. This was my own classmate’s issue when she told me her translate app wasn’t working; she clicked on the icon in the Launchpad, and seemingly nothing happened. She had no idea that another tiny icon was added to the many occupying the menubar. Having it run as a mini Menubar app should be an option, but definitely not the default to avoid this type of obvious confusion and the other issues outlined above.

So yeah, this app absolutely needs to leave the Menubar for a number of reasons. I’ve written and tweeted to the developers several times these past two years and have gotten nothing in the way of a response, which is a shame, becaue their iOS apps translate very well. In fact, this app does translate well for the languages I use it for (Spanish, French, and Irish) but the awful usability problems outlined above take away so much from its overall utility. So, suffice to say I’m pretty disappointed that after two years of waiting for this basic improvement, all we got was a generic “bug fixes” update with no acknowledgment of this issue. I really hope these devs are listening but I don’t have a lot of faith they are...

kittycat262728 about iTranslate - Translator, v1.3.0