A feature i quite appreciate in Tiger is the Dictionary application, widget and service:

All three incarnations of basically the same functionality include a full-featured thesaurus and dictionary based on the New Oxford American Dictionary which of course only covers English. The typography of the entries is very detailled in application and widget, while the service has a simple font. Yet it is quite impressive, how seemless you call up the service by a shortcut (ctrl-apple-d) and get a small window right on top of the word where your pointer is at. It works with text fields in every application.

This reminds me somewhat of the attempts of the Greasemonkey community to enhance websites by adding functionality to a page (e.g. extra info or links) and deleting some other non-functionality (e.g. banners). Pyr0 has found today a script that links words on a page to the Wikipedia. While those efforts are quite interesting — e.g. the addition of real new functionality: smart searches for gmail, 2nd example on this article — i would be quite happy if the Dictionary in osx could be extended with other dictionaries (e.g. German) and encyclopedias (e.g. Wikipedia) as the browser is not the only place where i’m confronted with text. The preferences window of Dictionary at least leaves the impression that more dictionaries could be added. It actually looks quite reasonable (though fake).
There is also a designated folder for dictionary-files:

/Library/Dictionaries/

• New Oxford American Dictionary.dict (127.6 MB)
• Oxford American Writers Thesaurus.dict (16,4MB)

Both are packages filled with gibberish text files. Does anybody know what kind of files those are? Is there any information on the .dict-packages? It seems not to be documented over at Apple. I would really like to see an integration of a lightweight Wikipedia (maybe offline) and local-lingual dictionaries.

(Due to a spam no comments/trackback for this post anymore.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 9th, 2005 at 9:50 pm and is filed under english, geekery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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