Clockwise

Today while looking over at the Lexin site I noticed that there will be a replacement for the Lexin Swedish-English dictionary. It is called The People’s Dictionary and will allow people to download the entire dictionary later this spring. It is based upon Lexin’s Swedish-English dictionary, but will be improved by the people.

I’m not quite sure what will happen to the existing system, will the Swedish-English dictionary be removed with just a link to The People’s Dictionary and all the other languages remain on Lexin? Probably good that I won’t have time for Lexikon in the next while so I can see how this develops before I commit to one action or another. One great thing is it that The People’s Dictionary will be downloadable, and so chances are high that I can make everything completely offline on the iPhone. Exactly how I will do that is up in the air, either as a free upgrade or as a completely new application.

I’m only two weeks late in blogging about this. Lexikon version 1.2 has been approved for sale for two weeks. The biggest new features are:

- Swedish localization of the interface (provided by my wife), though it might need some tweaks.

- The search now has a filter akin to the Contacts for seeing if a word has already been cached. The search is insensitive to special characters so a with match a, ä and å, just in case you can’t quite remember how it is spelled.

- More refinements on the UI to give it some extra polish.

This cleared my list of features I wanted to implement with Lexikon and it seemed like it was going to be shelved as a project. Then inspiration hit and I’ve got a full to-do list again. It is looking like the next version will be 2.0 as I will be bringing a lot of functionality to the table. I’m hoping to provide users with suggestions in case their search fails, as provided by Lexin, support all or most of the other languages Lexin supports (with an English or Swedish interface) and the final item I’m toying with is including something so you can autoload common Swedish words (due to the support for all secondary languages I won’t bother with the reverse look up) to populate the cache. It won’t be an extensive auto lookup list, but it should be handy for those that don’t always have internet access to have a healthy cache established quickly. Due to the copyright I can’t provide these translations with the program, but I can make it so you can quickly and easily grab the data on your own device.

Version 2.0 will also incorporate some under-the-hood changes I’ve wanted to make to the code. Things that need cleaning up if I’m going to support all the other languages Lexin does. Unfortunately version 2.0 is going to be a long ways off as I have another iPhone program for a client, one with a partner and some web development to do first.