Wednesday, October 31, 2007

OX 10.5 Leopard: New Dictionary Development Kit

One of Leopard's new language features is the addition of a cool Japanese dictionary alongside the English one in Dictionary.app. But I see that in the XCode stuff, in Developer/Extras, there is also now a Dictionary Development Kit. Assuming it is not too hard to use, this could open the door to the creation by ordinary users of all kinds of additional dictionaries in other languages.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am interested in beginning a serious discussion about developing such a dictionary, and also implementing the code involved. If anyone else shares this, let us discuss it on the page I set up for this:
http://www.herbig.us/MSE/English-Chinese_Dictionary.app/English-Chinese_Dictionary.app.html

Tom Gewecke said...

Make sure you post this on the Chinese-Mac list too:

http://groups.google.com/group/chinesemac/

Tom Gewecke said...

PS I don't see any way to make comments on your blog at this time.

Anonymous said...

"Tom Gewecke said...
PS I don't see any way to make comments on your blog at this time"

Problem fixed.

Unknown said...

Do you know anybody who's begun building a fairly generic "bridge" application that would let us make stardard-format dictionaries available to the application? I know there are several open formats for dictionaries - both traditional and translation dictionaries - which are used by programs like TranslateIt! for OS X and ISTR there's an OmniDict that also takes some open format. Surely it shouldn't be impossible to build something to do this?

I haven't even begun to look into it, but I'm surprised that I haven't heard anybody else has ...

Ricky Buchanan
ATMac - http://atmac.org/ - Assistive Technology for Mac OS X Users

Tom Gewecke said...

I think the fellow who did the Chinese dictionary might be working on something like that (Yuri.Yuriev at gmail.com).

http://m10lmac.blogspot.com/2007/12/os-x-105-leopard-chinese-module-for.html

Anonymous said...

I would also love to see this dictionary on the iPhone / iPod Touch. I've emailed Apple about if they have plans for this, but nothing.

In Japan, there is a huge market for electronic translators. It seems insane not to include the dictionary with the new iPod Touch. It would open up another market, and combine another device with the iPod.

Tom Gewecke said...

I suspect 3rd parties will start producing such things now that the iPhone SDK is out. Apple never provides info on future plans for any of its products.