Mathieu Tozer's Dev Blog

Ok, so I've got words (lookup) connecting to any dict protocol dictionary in the world, but I still have plenty of issues to address.

The results being returned are themselves hard to read in a table view. It may be necessary to parse them into one line, so that at least the first few words can be read.

Right now when people walk away from the internet, they have gone from having plenty of dictionaries, to having none.

Also, as words are added enmasse, the dictionary lookup service adds things to the array one by one, but the user interface isn't updated until the very last definition has been found. It would be nice to add each as they are found.. but having thought about that the dict protocol returns one struct for each query containing all things found as it is, so it wouldn't work that way definition by definition, but it could work for word by word, and it will work this way without any modification.

In the dictionaries preferences pane, whether the dictionary is available online or offline should be indicated. Users should be able to specify the name, and kind of dictionary, and if needed specify the location, whether it be server or local file.

There should be some indication of what is being done in the user interface. A spiral progress indicator should be spun while the definitions are being hunted down.

Kind of need to write up my application to do this as final year project.

Submitted the application today. I'm pretty tired tonight so might take a rest from Cocoa until tomorrow.