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Why I built a dictionary app

wordnote.app

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Re: Why I built a dictionary app

#151

Post by cal85 »

kworks wrote: post #142
cal85 wrote: post #91

This looks great, congratulations to the author. I will be using it. In case you’ve never read it, this 2014 blog post is an all time favourite of mine. It really opened up my thinking about words and definitions: You’re probably using the wrong dictionary - http://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary Ever since reading that, I have tended to use the 1913 Webster’s as my primary dictionary, supplemented by various modern ones…

James Somer's excellent blog post (and mcphee-draft-no-4) provoked a fundamental shift in the way I rewrite. Can't understate its effect. Not the least of which is that I now turn to the 1913 Webster's several times a day. Agreed that the UI on the present iOS app is less than ideal. That said easy mobile access to those sublime definitions is super helpful. Gratitude to the dev. Will definitely be using Wordnote (gr…

> Agreed that the UI on the present iOS app is less than ideal.

Which one do you use? I think there might be a few that use 1913 Webster's. I use this one [1]. It could be a lot better, but it works.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/websters-writers-dictionary/id...

Re: Why I built a dictionary app

#153

Post by xtreak29 »

jdthedisciple wrote: post #82
xtreak29 wrote: post #25

I too wrote a similar app for my personal problem and also served to be a good way to learn about kotlin and Android ecosystem. I also tried a rewrite in flutter and compose. The idea was to use select the word and then click meaning from context menu so that meaning occurs as notification and disappears in 15 seconds. I used Wiktionary as dataset source and app works offline. https://play.google.com/store/apps/detai…

> I also tried a rewrite in flutter Tried? Mind elaborating? I'm working on a flutter app atm - do you mean it didn't work out? / you didn't end up liking flutter?

I used rewriting as a learning experience. I found flutter to be simpler with respect to UI and state management compared to using XML by default for UI. Since mine was a crud app flutter was okay. I later found jetpack compose which has flutter like UI composition and I liked it better since I can access the existing Android library ecosystem too.

Re: Why I built a dictionary app

#155

Post by lowatt »

Nice app. Keep every word queried in a list and revisit them to enhance memory. This is exactly the same way I expanded my English vocabulary 10 years ago.

My simplistic solution was a command-line script which googles "define {word}" and extracts the definition into the console. The query history is appended to a text file (partitioned by date) saved in Dropbox.

Someone tried to use it in an Alfred workflow. Don't know if they made it or not. It seems it's hard to query google in a script now.

Re: Why I built a dictionary app

#156

Post by jxramos »

nicbou wrote: post #100
jxramos wrote: post #53

> Noise Free It's incredible how many distractions this kind of app usually has: extra clicks, unnecessary features, rectangular ads, and too many typography styles. I very much like this adaptation of the term noise. I’m starting to realize a growing angst against intrusive noisy products that present junk to me I did not ask for. I realize there’s a non-zero cognitive load to ads and variable UI that’s unrelated to…

I use ad blocker rules to cut out a lot of that noise. I found the internet impossible to use without it. I have stopped using apps because they bypass those rules. The worst ones are suggested content feeds. They're everywhere , including in your operating system.

Very true indeed they're cluttering up the OS's and it feels like there's no escape.

This unexpected change to the windows taskbar broke my concentration on some task I was doing the other day, and right away I stopped what I was doing to go chase down how to disable the thing so I wouldn't lose more moments of concentration in the future. https://superuser.com/questions/1725905/get-rid-of-decorativ...

Such a crazy idea of our own OS's being the source of interruptions. Even iOS is getting in on this with the Maps app I noticed the other week, I'd even count iTunes displaying a bunch of random album titles that are on the ugly end of the spectrum in my opinion. At least iTunes uses the same batch of images so one can train to ignore it. It's kind of interesting to conceptualize the OS as like this pesky idle assistant just hungry for attention and with nothing to do who likewise feels its owner is just as idle as them with free time and free attention to spare. "My owner isn't doing anything special or fun, let me bug him with this visual distraction". It's even funny at a meta level to even observe myself getting riled up over this growing assault.

It's interesting you say impossible to use without it, I wonder if a certain subpopulation of folks are more prone to these traps. Basically those with a high degree of attention to detail, those with sharp powers of observation, and those juggling a ton of things in their lives where spare mental capacity is on the short end of the spectrum.

Re: Why I built a dictionary app

#157

Post by tartoran »

liquidise wrote: post #31

Well this is... eerie. I just released Stictionary[1] on Friday. It is an offline, ad free, dictionary that remembers words you look up. It gives a word of the day and provides (admittedly underfeatured atm) flashcards to review your word lists. It includes optional syncing to keep your word lists across devices. I've been holding off posting about it while i complete the website[2]. Love to see someone else had such…

Just what I wanted for years but gave up and wrote words on pieces of paper that eventually get lost.

Great execution, thanks for sharing it with the world

Re: Why I built a dictionary app

#158

Post by vthommeret »

achempion wrote: post #121
vthommeret wrote: post #75

I saw a few posts discuss using the Wiktionary dump directly vs. the freeDictionary API, which is difficult to do because the raw wiki text isn't immediately usable. I actually created and open sourced a project several years ago that I never publicized that lexes and parses the Wiktionary dump: https://github.com/vthommeret/glossterm Specifically it can understand and execute 21 different wiki text templates (e.g. "…

Great work I'm working on similar dictionary app and found wiktionary insanely usable as dictionary source. Here is one more project aiming to make wiktionary data usable as json data structure: https://github.com/tatuylonen/wiktextract . It has a link to a site https://kaikki.org/ which hosts dictionary data dumps.

Thanks! Yeah I've seen a few similar projects (particularly written Java which I wasn't excited about). That looks like a nice project. It's written in Python and says it can take from an hour to several days depending on the computer and they don't recommend running it on a Mac.

I don't have up-to-date benchmarks but my project is written in Go and everything was designed to be as highly parallel as possible, broken up into multiple pipeline steps (splitting the Wiktionary dump, lexing, parsing, resolving, etc...) with a high emphasis on performance so I would assume it's faster but would need to do a head-to-head test.

Re: Why I built a dictionary app

#159

Post by WhyNotHugo »

> I was worried about the speed of react-native querying a 21MB SQLite database.

I often have similar concerns when writing code. Then I remember that "normal" applications send the query over the network to another continent, where a server has to query a HUGE database, and relay the result back.

It's amazing how we have such powerful devices, but are so accustomed to underestimating their capacity.

Re: Why I built a dictionary app

#160

Post by Forricide »

wingerlang wrote: post #103
Forricide wrote: post #98

The flashcards feature of this makes it seem super useful for language learning. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to support non-English languages? At least on iOS, the OS has built-in dictionary support for a huge variety of languages. It would be super cool to see something just like this app, but with support for more languages, perhaps through the OS's dictionary (although I'm not sure if iOS makes that available t…

Learning language is much more than drilling vocabulary. And I say this as someone who has built at least 3 different flashcard apps for myself over the years. It is very low down on the list, especially if it is words only. And no, it doesn't seem like iOS gives us access to its dictionary as developer, unfortunately.

That's unfortunate. I'm lucky enough to have studied my target language on & off for over a decade and one of my main issues at this point is vocabulary. But you're not wrong - it's not useful for everyone.
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