As you might know I wrote an iPhone application that has been rejected from the AppStore. The application was a Chinese to English / English to Chinese dictionary based around the free CC-CEDICT dictionary. (The reason it was rejected was because it could define curse words)
In order to recoup some of the code, I decided to port the application to Air – so I can at least use it on the desktop. (I’ve been chipping away at an Android version, but that has been a slow process).
Here is a screenshot of it in action:
It’s a beta release, but most of the important features are there. The usage is similar to how it works on the iPhone. In fact, the help file is a direct copy so parts of it might not make any sense.
It supports the much hailed wild card characters like the iPhone version did. You can do tonal fuzzy searches (“wo-” will return “wo” of any tone – see the help section.). Here is a shot of a tonal fuzzy search
And, of course, like the old iPhone version – did I mention that it got rejected for defining words? – the application can just figure out if you are typing Simplified Chinese, pinyin or English.
Since this version doesn’t have to conform to arbitrary made up rules that are applied differently to people based on their income and influence levels, this version can define any word in big, bold text.
And the best part of all, it should run on Linux just fine. You can install the application from the Xiao CiDian website by clicking on the badge on the right hand side of the page.