Comments on: 小词典 Desktop, DianHua on the iPhone

By: NIC

NIC — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 13:23:30 +0000

Hey – have you sent the email out yet? Would love to check it out. So far it’s great!

By: 小罗

小罗 — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 04:25:02 +0000

你好薄瑞撤，

See http://xiaocidian.com for a download!

By: 薄瑞撤

薄瑞撤 — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 02:28:28 +0000

我是Youngstown State University学生。I’d like to try the 中文 dictionary extension.

By: 小罗

小罗 — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 15:13:10 +0000

hi Steve thanks for the input.

I've thought about trying to add that to the application (which would not be trivial), but I don't see the point in spending time working on the iPhone app any more because 1) it still hasn't been approved and 2) it was subitted long before dianhua so having to set myself apart from somthing I was first at doing is kind of lame.

Number 1 is the biggest reason. Why should I spend time adding features to something that will never see the light of day?

Maybe a good suggestion for dianhua since he can get stuff on the app store.

By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 09:47:06 +0000

A possible additional feature that you could add to your program, 小词典, would be OCR. I envision utilizing the camera on the iphone to take a picture of chinese characters. This, in my opinion, would be a fantastic form of character input. On a recent trip to Asia, I ran in occasional characters that I didn’t recognize. It would have been wonderful to simply point my iphone at signs, newspapers, billboards, etc, take a picture, and then instantly see the definition/pronounciation. This would be a great way for 小词典 to distinguish itself over Dianhua.

By: 小罗

小罗 — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:40:39 +0000

Hi Jon,

My apologies that this post is a bit unclear - DianHua is not my application, the desktop version of 小词典 is what I was looking for beta testers for.

I have thought about it and if 小词典 iPhone version isn't meant to be on the iPhone then so be it. I am not going to circumvent anything.

Thanks for your nice offer though.

By: Jon

Jon — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 10:26:52 +0000

Hi Rob,

I am always willing to test out competitive packages. Please send a beta version this way and I will test.

Will it install on a hacked iphone 1.1.4 or 2.0.X?

Not to worry, this software will get you tons of exposure......

Cheers, Jon in Shenzhen

By: alex

alex — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 05:19:54 +0000

Hey Rob,

Yah, both software packages are using CC-CEDICT... and mine does support the CTRL-CMD-D -- I have everything indexed. But, that's okay... competition breeds better products! Cheers!

Alex

By: 小罗

小罗 — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 01:27:46 +0000

Hi Alex,

That’s ok, my bubble isn’t burst at all – I like mine better :-D The CEDICT is probably is not based on CC-CEDICT which has far more words than CEDICT (though I do like the sound files). I am guessing by the way the entries are listed in yours you can’t do control+command+d in all cooca applications to do quick lookups? I still like mine :)

Eventually if the iPhone version gets approved, it will also be easy to keep both of those applications in sync and have a nice suite of applications if you will.

I also like that mine links back to the CC-CEDICT website so it’s easy to update entries if you find errors, and I think it’ll be a nice boon for the project.

After the video is done processing, you can see why I like mine better here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfuKP9XgUjc

By: alex

alex — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 01:15:37 +0000

Hey Rob,

Sorry to burst your bubble, but there are a few other products out that utilize Apple’s Dictionary services, one of them written by me: http://www.alex-betty.com/pingguo-dictionary/, and another listed at http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/33658 — both of which are in the freeware space. I may open source mine when I feel it is most stable and may have a separate package for Zhuyin and Pinyin.

Alex