Hi, I wrote an EPWING reader for Japanese dictionaries. I wasn't happy with existing ones, so this one adds some new features and should be overall cleaner and easier to use. One major feature is the ability to click words in an entry to look them up.

(Thought I'd post a proper thread about it now that I've released a beta)

Homepage + download link:
http://dictionary.manabi.org/

Mac OSX 10.5+ only at the moment. Windows support soon. I've only tested it on my 10.6 machine so please let me know if it breaks.

Go to Preferences to add EPWING dictionaries. I should add a message that tells you that on first launch...

Please let me know what you think, I'm open to suggestions or comments.

This looks really good. Just need to wait for the Windows version.

I'm on 10.5.8 - I get

"Manabi Dictionary has encountered a fatal error, and will now terminate. A Python runtime could not be located. You may need to instal a framework build of Python, or edit PyRuntimeLoocations array in this application's Info.plst file."

Hope I can get this to work, looks really great - thanks.

Sidenote - Can anyone tell me how to post a picture in this forum?

BBC directions
If you want to display an image you can use the img tag.

produces:



How is that supposed to work if it's a picture I have on my computer, not a website?

Sorry for being such a computer newb....

TaylorSan Wrote:How is that supposed to work if it's a picture I have on my computer, not a website?

It doesn't. You have to upload it to some website first, and then you can provide a link to it. (Makes sense, right? It has to exist somewhere on the internet where the rest of us can see it, because we can't get to your computer :-))

Looking forward to it. I recall even good old DDwin working quite well, but I'm not very happy with the existing readers readers for the Mac. Logophile is OK, but not great, Kotonoko is never finished, and Jedict is a no-no for EBwing dictionaries.

@pm215 - (or anyone else)

one more noob Q (then hopefully I'll stop)

Is there a simple strategy for this - meaning, the purpose for posting a pic I have on my computer is for this forum. If it has to exist somewhere else, where? I don't have a web site. I have a few times wanted to just put a picture of an error message, or other things (like the thread where people were sharing their handwritten kanji). The only thing I think I could do is make a portfolio in facebook or something, but that seems kind of silly as it's open to other eyes....

No big deal as I rarely need/want to do that here, but I'm curious how people do it in this situation (ie something they personally have, not something they find on a site).

Sorry about that TaylorSan, I think I've fixed that now. Uploading the new version...

Re: images, just use an image host. imgur.com or whatever.

I fixed that bug, you can download it now, thanks.

wahnfrieden, I re-downloaded it, and got the error terminate message. And thanks on the images - I'll check it out for the future.

What version of OSX are you on? Is it an Intel machine? It should only work on 10.5+ and Intel, at least for now.

I fixed some things though, so please try again.

http://dictionary.manabi.org/

looks nice! let us know when the linux version is available

I'd like to see a function to perform a lookup in an already running instance (e.g. firefox (without --no-remote), emacsclient for emacs, xpdf -remote, ebview-client for ebview (not that that one actually works...), etc)

Another vote for the Windows version, can you update this thread when its ready? Mac is a nice platform and I was on it for years but I'm on Windows these days because of work.

@edwinbradford, this app's development is currently on hiatus until I get through some other projects. To be honest, although very little of the code has to change for Windows, just building the binary for Windows was being an enormous pain and kind of demotivated me from working on it, for now.

It's an important project to me though so I will be getting around to it eventually. I'll update this thread when I've made progress. Thanks for your interest.

TaylorSan Wrote:@pm215 - (or anyone else)

one more noob Q (then hopefully I'll stop)

Is there a simple strategy for this - meaning, the purpose for posting a pic I have on my computer is for this forum. If it has to exist somewhere else, where? I don't have a web site. I have a few times wanted to just put a picture of an error message, or other things (like the thread where people were sharing their handwritten kanji). The only thing I think I could do is make a portfolio in facebook or something, but that seems kind of silly as it's open to other eyes....

No big deal as I rarely need/want to do that here, but I'm curious how people do it in this situation (ie something they personally have, not something they find on a site).

TaylorSan, I personally use MediaFire. It's pretty simple to use, you can just go to the website and drop your files there. you can upload any kind of file, don't even need to create an account, and for images you can either use their built-in galleries or get the url of each image to display it anywhere you want. It even gives you unlimited space. The only downside is that in theory files could be removed if no one access them in 30 days, but it seems they aren't very diligent at enforcing that policy.

Another option would be using a shared folder with Dropbox. I think you can share a folder and then just get a file's shared url directly from your computer, without having to open any website. If you don't have Dropbox, you may use this referral link and get 250 extra MB for free for both of us.

@wahnfrieden Understood I compiled a binary once, it worked but it was painful, no rush. I'm only just getting started with EPWING on Windows anyway, I'll try out DDwin for the time being, I used to have an EPWING reader on my PDA and loved it.

@TaylorSan, sorry to see you having problems getting images online, we all had to learn how to do it at some point. I use Google Docs for exactly for this sort of thing, you probably already have a Google account. You can upload any image to Google Docs from within your browser then you can share the image url (the link) with everyone and there are no restrictions.

Here's the link to the guided tour http://www.google.com/google-d-s/tour1.html

@edwinbradford pure python apps are pretty easy to build into a binary on Windows - I was having issues since I have Qt as a dependency as well as some really old C libraries, and was running into some bugs with py2exe which doesn't seem to be maintained by its author anymore. It's all open source if you're already experienced with this and want to give it a go

Thanks but I've a long list of tasks to get through before I even consider having a go
Incidentally I tried DDWin and it wouldn't read the EPWING files and I tried EBwin and it was pants so you should have a captive market.