Existing users, 
 Dragon Dictionary - 1.0A Chinese-English dictionary |
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Feedback Summary:
| This Version: | |||||
| Overall Rating: |   (4.2) |
Features: | (4.0) |
Support: | (3.8) |
| Ease of Use: | (4.5) |
Quality / Stability: | (4.0) |
Price: | (5.0) |
Key to Types of Feedback:
Reviews 
Troubleshooting 
Usage Tips 
Developer Notes 
Commentary 
Featured Reviews
How to Update DD - Version: 1.0, 11/16/2007 09:09PM PST
(1 of 1 users found this comment useful)
lantianer
Use the updated CEDICT ? - Version: 1.0, 10/8/2007 10:40PM PST
twoodsworth
DD is great ... but I guess freeware means a dearth of updates. The CEDICT database continues to get much better, but DD still uses the same database that it did a couple of years ago .... place names in particular are a major plus in the newer versions.
DD perfect with QIM - Version: 1.0, 9/22/2006 07:54PM PST
Fred E--2008
Dragon Dictionary is a _gem_. I use it in conjunction with QIM, which generates various hànzì from pinyin, and then I check the resulting candidate hanzi in DD to check their meanings. DD works also in reverse, showing candidate hànzì for a pinyin entry. Either way, the results are presented as variants and in combination with other hànzì, which are all defined in English. Both DD and QIM are very short on documentation, but since both work simply and directly (QIM was a mystery until I realized it worked through the language flag menu), documentation is not needed after one gets the hang of it (them).
I downloaded DD a little while ago and like it better than any other Chinese dictionary program (I have no less than five). However, it comes with a terribly out-of-date version of CEDICT, the actual dictionary file that has all the words in it. Fortunately, it's very easy to update, and having done so, I've continued to use it without any problems. Here's how. (You'll probably need Administrator access to your computer to install/modify the program.)
• Install DD, downloading from VersionTracker
• Download the up-to-date dictionaries for Traditional and Simplified characters (courtesy MDBG)
• Find the DD application where it's installed (probably /Applications folder) and duplicate it (command-D), renaming it something like "Dragon Dictionary Updated".
• Control-click on your duplicate. Select "Show Package Contents". Open the Contents Folder, then the Resources folder, and two of the files you see should be "cedict.b5" and "cedict.gb".
• Replace these two files with the new ones you downloaded, and close the window.
• Your updated DD Application will be much bigger now, because it contains much bigger dictionaries with more entries. Run it and you should have many more words!
Unfortunately, DD wasn't written to handle the better 'UTF-8' format dictionary, which includes both Simplified and Traditional characters. I suspect this, too, is the cause of the minor annoyance of the menu where you have to select whether you're using Simplified or Traditional Chinese. My only other gripe with DD is the menu to select "Chinese to English" or "English to Chinese". It too is a minor annoyance, which should be easy enough to remove, I imagine. Otherwise, I love this app! Perhaps the developer can bring out a version 1.1 with these improvements, and either functionality to automate updating the dictionaries (even an AppleScript would do!), or just instructions such as I've written here.
On the whole, I love DD! Oh, and FIT for typing Chinese—freeware that's much, much better for Pinyin than Apple's input method in Tiger.