Beyond iOS 4 support the biggest new feature is easier searching, the search bar is always on the screen instead of scrolling off. In addition Lexikon will now better inform you when Lexin is unavailable, some stray memory leaks have been fixed, removal of Pinch analytics, a better default screen to explain how to use Lexikon among other misc. fixes.

As to an offline app I don’t know that I will do one. I find the Folkets Lexikon data lacking, you basically get one word translation and little context, you also don’t get helpful things like the different forms of words, important for those learning the language. I also looked at Wiktionary which has some nice information, some words even have pronunciations for some words. However the overall number of words is lacking.

This site has sadly been a bit neglected as in addition to working on Lexikon, other projects and client work I’m also redoing this site to improve marketing and communication.

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 first blogged on a WordPress blog. When Textpattern came out I switched to it. Then I switched back to WordPress when Textpattern didn’t quite scratch my itch. Then came a long flirtation with blogs built using Ruby on Rails. First there was Typo and it was good, but it didn’t work well on shared hosting. It became more and more bloated and harder to deal with. Next I switched to Mephisto, which was good, but it required using the Liquid templating language, which severely limited the ease and power of the templates. Then came Simplelog which is slick and most of what I want from a blogging engine, but development has stopped. When I’ve looked at the code intending to implement the features I want, it becomes a toss-up if I should just start from scratch or try working them in. All the time WordPress has been sitting quietly on the sidelines with all the features I want, it just doesn’t have a useless yellow (or should I say Ruby) vinyl sticker that makes it seem cooler to this web geek.

What did I do to get out of my rut? It’s turned out that the best way to get moving forward was to throw out what ideas I had most gotten attached to. The domain porteighty.com and a shade of blue #003366. I recently moved to Sweden and that opened up another avenue to think about with regards to the domain. I found a list of words ending with se. After reading through the words and getting overwhelmed by the options I was up back by the top with clockwise on the screen, and since it was available I decided to go with it. A visit to Adobe’s kuler and I had a color scheme by Mats Holmberg called Orange on Olive. I swapped the orange for Falu red since I liked the aesthetics better and it could pay homage to my new home at the same time.

I’m not quite sure on the voice that will emerge here. I intend to talk about web development and specifics to doing it as a freelancer in Sweden. There will probably also be random things along the way. Though it’s entirely possible that as time goes it evolves into something different.