What I love about this piece is that the author lays out a specific set of goals for their project. I find this is immensely helpful to do at the start of a project. I often have an idea that I think is cool but after writing down what I want to do I realize that it’s not such a great idea.
Why I built a dictionary app
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Re: Why I built a dictionary app
#12Dictionaries are one of those things that should be free, at least the digital version. This is 2022 - shouldn't governments pay the dictionary creators using tax payer money and make the digital version available for free, to anyone for any use? How much does it cost to maintain a dictionary anyway? A few million dollars at best? It is crazy that a ton of projects don't even get started, because these APIs are so ex…
Why should governments get to decide which words we use? Unless you are a plusgood citizen making agitprop for the proles.
That's a strange take.
They won't they would fund some other org or dept to do the work. Same way you have a public education system, or public health care.
Re: Why I built a dictionary app
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s wrong with Wiktionary, which the author used for this?
Sounds like it was a bit tedious (and expensive) to hammer the server for 30 hours... vs. a downloadable database (which, granted, could get out of date).
Yeah, I wonder why they didn’t just download it from https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiktionary/ per https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Help:FAQ.
Re: Why I built a dictionary app
#14Excellent app! I had been using Obsidian (writing key-values manually) and sometimes use Spotlight (dictionary). Both are not really efficient.
Re: Why I built a dictionary app
#15Dictionaries are one of those things that should be free, at least the digital version. This is 2022 - shouldn't governments pay the dictionary creators using tax payer money and make the digital version available for free, to anyone for any use? How much does it cost to maintain a dictionary anyway? A few million dollars at best? It is crazy that a ton of projects don't even get started, because these APIs are so ex…
Dictionaries are more free today than ever before. It's actually surprising how free they are given that (good) dictionaries are actually very labour intensive to create.
Re: Why I built a dictionary app
#16Nicely done. It seems to put the "transitive verb" definition at the top, followed by the noun, even if the verb-usage is less common. Is there metadata that indicates which is more common, to adjust the order?
I also noticed this - e.g ‘wheel’ - I assume noun first would be a better default but haven't thought about it deeply
Re: Why I built a dictionary app
#17> I promise I didn't have my expectations too high, I only had a few core principles
Proceeds to list 6 pretty high requirements.
The author’s not wrong, those are good requirements, but not to be expected from any standard app these days.
To dig on the first: “ Offline support”, this in itself requires a lot of work.
Going the technically easy way will often go in direct opposite to your business model (mobile ads or access info sales). Going for subscriptions or other mechanisms will have you do harder technical solutions, making that specific innocent requirement a decently high hurdle.
Re: Why I built a dictionary app
#18Looks very pretty indeed. Will give it a spin.
For those interested in alternative dictionary apps for the English language I'd also recommend checking out the advanced english dictionary [1] as well. It certainly checks all the boxes the author asked for and then some more.
EDIT: Just noticed the author was kind enough to share the source code. That's super cool - kudos for doing that.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/advanced-english-dictionary/id...
Re: Why I built a dictionary app
#19Dictionaries are one of those things that should be free, at least the digital version. This is 2022 - shouldn't governments pay the dictionary creators using tax payer money and make the digital version available for free, to anyone for any use? How much does it cost to maintain a dictionary anyway? A few million dollars at best? It is crazy that a ton of projects don't even get started, because these APIs are so ex…
I just made something like that: https://public.law/dictionary
Scraping government sites for glossaries, mashing up the definitions to create a free comparative international dictionary.
Re: Why I built a dictionary app
#20Actually, iOS already has built-in support for dictionary and thesaurus. In any native text input field, select a word and choose Define or Look Up. The choice of dictionary is customizable; I usually choose New Oxford American Dictionary and Oxford Dictionary of English (not to be confused with the venerable Oxford English Dictionary). They are high quality dictionaries. They are basically the same except that the p…
Awesome. Did not know I could disable that content. Also, dropped a few dictionaries I had enabled (Russian? Spanish? German?) - hopefully the swipe-to-text will improve accuracy now, too.