Mathieu Tozer's Dev Blog

Cocoa, the development of Words, and other software projects (including those dang assessment tasks).

Older Notes

Published Sunday, October 08, 2006 by Mathieu | E-mail this post

Whittling away at the errors. Taking what I need from other's source code. Making it build, compile. Other people's thoughts and thinking coming though the code. Learning about new coding styles.

Well I'm mighty proud of myself now... it was a long road, but the architecture I've set up to make words extensible for different dictionary types works! I plug in anything, and as long as the new dictionary is compatible with the application's API (actually as long as the correct API is provided by the new plug in) then Words will go and get the blob of definitions in the right way. The next thing to do is to complete the StardictDict class to actually look up blobs from the dictionary it is assigned to.

Next step is to actually do some searching and to move the dictionary in and out of the Words sphere with import and export, so that they can be packaged up and put on a server for downloading via the dictionary downloader.

I need some kind of policy for dictionary naming conventions.

File extension: .wordsDict

Apparently, the unique naming convention I have inbuilt so far is by the "Name" attribute. So I have to make sure this is all unique and stuff, for all kinds. It would be probably best if there are no spaces allowed too. This name can be used for the file name, and also internally to determine uniqueness.

Pivot_Target_Location_Type.wordsDict

Location is probably the hard bit. It would be something like dictDotOrg

It has to be the most.

Think about ordering in a list. Would it be more convenient to order the dictionaries by target? Or by protocol? In the case of non networked dictionaries, location would mean the name that it's generally given. Like en-ja or something. It doesn't really matter as long as it's a fairly unique name.

This means that other protocols can have a en-ja dictionary but still not clash.

Type_Pivot_Target_Location.wordsDict

It all seems to work, still more testing to do, and more data entry to do to support more dictionaries.