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CEDICT for Apple Dictionary 1.1 (Mac OS X)

Why not Tiger? Panther?  

I've tried almost every Mac Chinese/English dictionary there is, and so far like Dragon Dictionary best (and I updated its database—tips in comments at VersionTracker's DD page.

But I'm running Tiger! Developer, is there a reason this can't be made available for previous OS's? 什么理由？This is an exciting product, I hope to test it!

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Sunday, December 23 2007 @ 12:56 AM PST

Dragon Dictionary 1.0 (Mac OS X)

How to Update DD  

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 However, it comes with a terribly out-of-date version of CEDICT, the actual dictionary file that has all the words in it.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.

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Friday, November 16 2007 @ 09:09 PM PST

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