Saturday, December 13, 2008

English-esperanto dictionary for Pocket PC

Quite some time ago I wrote this little dictionary program for Pocket PCs (Windows Mobile). It translates words between English and Esperanto and you can even modify entries in your own personal copy, or create new entries.


I don't remember where I got the dictionary itself. It isn't high-quality. There are many errors, unhelpful translations, and some words missing, but this is typical of the Esperanto-English dictionaries I have seen.

The dictionary is stored as a trivially simple text file, which means it is possible to edit the dictionary in Notepad or, if you are a programmer, you could easily write a program that transforms other dictionaries into a text format that this program would understand.

It's very easy and quick to use. Just type the first few letters of a word and the dictionary will instantly search both the English-EO and EO-English dictionaries at once. The definitions are shown in a large font, in case you have a small Pocket PC phone or poor eyesight. When it shows the list of results, just press up and down on the Pocket PC's directional pad.

However, I never released this program before because I never polished it. The biggest problem is that it takes at least 30 seconds to start up (on the Pocket PC).

The program is written in C#. The cool thing about this is that the same program runs equally well on your PC!
  • Download Interdictionary.cab
    To install it on your Pocket PC, open your device in My Computer, and copy the CAB file to the device. Then, on the device, run File Explorer and find the same CAB file. Double-tap to install it, and then it will appear in your Programs list.
  • Download Interdictionary.zip
    This zip file contains the cab file above, plus the contents of the cab file so you can run the dictionary on your PC. To use, unzip this file, then double-click PPCDictionary.exe. Please note that the .NET Framework 2.0 must already be installed (it is installed on most computers already).
If you want the source code, just email me (gmail.com, qwertie256 at). You could also use Reflector to decompile it, which is always fun.

1 Comments:

At 12/13/2008 4:35 PM, Blogger Bill Chapman said...

Well done! Bonege!

Vi meritas gratulon.

 

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