Clockwise

I once read a report that sometimes telling the world what our plans are can satisfy that part of our brain saying we need to do something, without doing it. I think I can relate. However I don’t want to operate in complete radio silence. I am still in the transition stages from web development to iPhone, iPad and Mac development. Obviously the iPhone and iPad have been the most exciting for me, but if I find the right itch on the Mac I would like to scratch it as well.

I’m working on a 2.1 update to Lexikon. I can’t say for certain when this update will be ready to submit to Apple. The major feature will be to have the search bar always on screen as it is the main function of the app. There is also a crash to fix when your search term is non-latin and you try searching in the Swedish dictionary.

The next item in that arena will be to bring the Folkets Lexikon to the iPhone. This dictionary would be offline and contains 50% more words than Lexin. There is still some debate as to what the best way to deliver this is. Either as a separate application or an in-app purchase in Lexikon. I don’t want to have a bunch of products, but I also want to keep each application as simple as possible. It would’ve been easy to have a version of Lexikon for each language available, but at the same time the difference is very little. Folkets Lexikon on the other hand could be quite a different beast.

I am also going to look to make the Folkets Lexikon available as a plugin for the Mac OS X Dictionary.app.

I’m not certain what my plans are for the iPad at this time for Lexikon. The screen real estate is a lot and I’m not certain I’ll be able to improve on the interface elegantly to take advantage of it. I’m holding off until I have a device in my hands so I can experience it first hand.

I’m participating in Indie Relief, all proceeds of Lexikon from today January 20th will be donated to Doctors without Borders. Over 100 developers for the Mac and iPhone are participating, so go check Indie Relief and get great Mac/iPhone software while helping out Haiti.

Lexikon 2.0 has been submitted for review to Apple. This long anticipated release has been delayed by many things. However I’m happy to have it in Apple hands. App approval time has been quite quick around the holidays, so hopefully it will be approved shortly.

There are many improvements in this release. The application does a better job of remembering where you were and getting you back to that state. Term figures are now cached for later viewing in addition to the words, these are the bildtema you might see linked in a word’s definition. It’s easier to find the word you want as you will be presented with suggested corrections if the term you enter is not found. If Lexin can tell what word you meant if will automatically correct it and load the definition. The number of words in the list is now in the table footer. Lexin’s Swedish dictionary is supported now. In addition support for almost all the languages in Lexin: Albanian, Arabic, Bosnian, Croatian, Finnish, Greek, Kurmanji, Russian, Serbian (Latin & Cyrillic), Somali, Spanish and Turkish.

Next I will be tackling putting the Folkets Lexikon into an application. This app will be separate from Lexikon, only have English, have over 50% more words (Lexin has about 28,500 English words and Folkets Lexikon has over 46,000 word pairs). I have no ETA on this as there are still many things to work out, especially that it is indeed feasible to do as an application.

Update: After three days Apple has approved Lexikon 2.0 and it is available on the App Store.

Update 2: A small bug was found with selecting words from the filtered search list. An update has been built, tested and sent to Apple.

I wrapped up a project yesterday that hasn’t quite gone live yet for the Allies with Families organization. They are a Utah based non-profit helping families of children with mental health needs. The splash page is still in place, but the new site should be live in the next couple of days. The site was designed by my friend Chris Maynes.

It was my first real project to use HTML5 and ExpressionEngine. HTML5 is fairly simple to adopt going forward as long as you use a shiv for IE provided by the HTML5 Doctor. ExpressionEngine felt like the right CMS for the current and future needs of the site. The biggest win there was enabling and using file based templates. Editing HTML in forms harkened back to over ten years ago when I had a website on Angelfire.