I downloaded the dictionary and have briefly examined it. It employs the wonderful Ultralingua technology with some features missing such as reverse translation. You have to decide for yourself how important these features are.

One nice fact is that Collins is a separate program. Therefore, if you, like me, have multiple version 5 Ultralingua dictionaries, you can continue to use them alongside Collins without upgrading to version 6 of Ultralingua.

The version of Collins appears to be substantially the same as, if not identical to, the Palm version of Collins, which I have used for years. Perhaps the delay was due to negotiations?


Anyway, this is not the most comprehensive electronic version of Collins. Nonetheless, the entries are far superior to the corresponding Ultralingua entries but not as good as offerings for the PC. Ultralingua claims 80,000 entries. The WinTel version claims multiple hundreds of thousands. The counting may be suspect, but the WinTel version is clearly bigger. I typically use the verb "mettre" to test the quality of a Fr-Eng dictionary. In the hardback edition of Collins, the entry for this verb is measured in pages. In Ultralingua, the entry is 4 lines long. In Collins it is close to 50 lines and the Wintel version even longer.

We can only hope that Ultralingua continues to negotiate for the more comprehensive version. Many of us would pay a higher price (in my case, probably up to $80) to get the better dictionary.

So, I will probably purchase this version because it is much better than Ultralingua's offerings, and it is reasonably priced. I am not rating Collins because it is still inferior to the best electronic Fr.-Eng dictionary in this price range, so I could not give it a 5. However, this may not be Ultralingua's fault, so I do want to encourage them to continue their efforts to provide the best language dicitionary options for the Mac.