SDict Viewer / News: Recent posts

- 'Open...' did not work on Maemo 5, now fixed

- Improved drag scrolling
- Added large icons for OS2008
- Now can be installed with setuptools and easy_install

- Disable auto-capitalization in word input field (patch from Alex Teker)
- Improved word list sort order

- Improved drag article scrolling in OS2008
- Improved sort order in merged word completion list
- Limit on number of words in word completion list is increased
- Don't add application name to window title as Hildon does this automatically
- Works on Python Runtime beta for Chinook (OS2008)

We plan that this will be the last release of SDict Viewer.
All new development will be done in AardDict at http://code.google.com/p/aarddict.

SDict Viewer is a viewer for dictionaries in open format developed by AXMASoft (free dictionaries are available for download at http://sdict.com\). Primary goal of the project is to provide usable dictionary app for Nokia 770 and N800 running Maemo.

This is a bug fix release.
- Indexing on the fly and word lookup algorithms are improved to work correctly with dictionaries where word list in full index is not properly sorted (words that start with the same string are not grouped together).
- Better event handling when adding to history.
- Better article view handlers cleanup.

This version adds option to scroll article view by dragging. New menu item "Drag Selects" added to allow switching between scroll mode and select mode.

This release improves handling of large dictionaries like Wikipedia:
- Word lookups no longer freeze the UI and can be interrupted. When lookup starts UI provides immediate feedback in statusbar.
- Large dictionaries in Sdictionary format are typically underindexed which leads to long lookup times. Now SDict Viewer performs indexing for underindexed portions of dictionary when building word completion list. This significantly speeds up subsequent lookups of the same word (and similar words) at the cost of longer initial lookup and higher memory usage.
This release also introduces several minor fixes and UI enhancements, including:
- Display dictionary name instead of dictionary file name when loading
- Link clicks are now handled more accurately. As a result it is now possible to select link text without clicking the link. ... read more

This release delivers bug fixes, performance improvements and minor enhancements:
- After following internal link word sometimes was not selected in completion list, now fixed.
- Strings starting with "https://" are now interpreted as external links.
- Word selected in completion list is now saved/restored as part of application state.
- Word article lookup is considerably faster when word is selected in completion list.... read more

This release delivers several performance enhancements:
- Faster article lookup when word is selected in completion list.
- Articles are now formatted in background. Formatting stops if user looks up another word.

Download at http://sharesource.org/project/sdictviewer/

- Better handling of HTML entity refs in Wikipedia articles.
- Better parsing of http:// links. Previous version incorrectly parsed URLs with query parameters (& character).
- Internal and external links are now rendered in different colors.

Download at http://sharesource.org/project/sdictviewer/

SDict Viewer's source code has been imported into Mercurial repository at ShareSource.org (http://hg.sharesource.org/sdictviewer/).

- Article formatting algorithm is rewritten. New article formatter is based on HTMLParser. The code is smaller, simplier and slightly faster (~5%).
- Better handling of Wikipedia articles: HTML comments are ignored, HTML enties (ndash, lt, gt, amp, nbsp) are resolved to corresponding characters
- In article text strings starting with "http://" are converted to links, browser is opened when clicked

This is a minor update.
- Added "Paste" button for easier copying from clipboard on 770/N800
- Better handling of dictionaries with USC4 characters on narrow Python builds (previously dictionary would fail to open, now words with USC4 characters are ignored)
- Added missing .deb dependencies declaration

- Significantly improved dictionary loading: first time ~10-15% faster, up to 10 times faster after that (contributed by Sam Tygier)
- Ability to copy whole article or selected text to clipboard (new 'Copy' menu)
- File chooser 'remembers' location of last opened dictionary within same session
- Word selected in completion list remains selected when dictionary is added or removed (if the word is still in completion list)
- Minor bug fixes

Sam Tygier has joined SDict Viewer project. Welcome aboard!

My developer discounted Nokia N800 arrived yesterday. Thank you, Maemo Team, thank you Nokia! The device is very nice. And SDict Viewer runs very well on it :)

Starting from this release SDict Viewer works with multiple dictionaries at the same time:
- Word completion list combines words from multiple dictionaries and groups them by language
- If a word is found in multiple dictionaries, all articles are shown in tabs when word is selected
- Hardware 'Zoom In'/'Zoom Out' buttons navigate through tabs with articles
- New dictionary information dialog implemented to display information about all currently opened dictionaries
-- History now records words plus what language the word is in
-- dictionary menu items 'Open' and 'Recent' are replaced with 'Add' and 'Remove'... read more

SDict Viewer 0.2.2 is repackaged so that it can be installed with new Python 2.5 runtime environment.

SDict Viewer's source code has been migrated to Subversion. New development will be commited to Subversion repository (https://sdictviewer.svn.sourceforge.net/).

New in this version:
- Rendering of references (hyperlinks) in articles is reworked (in previous implementation references were not at the same baseline as the rest of the text)
- Menu structure is simplified in Maemo version (first level of menus is eliminated),
- "Exit" is renamed to "Close" (to be consistent with other Maemo applications)
- New tags are supported in article formatting: <sup> and <sub> for superscript and subscript text (can be found in articles of some encyclopedias, even though it is not part of Sdictionary format)
- Better handling of badly formatted articles with some tags missing closing tag

Finally SDict Viewer project gets a home page: http://sdictviewer.sourceforge.net/.

New in this version:
- "Dictionary">"Recent" submenu added to quickly open one of the most recently used dictionaries
- "Dictionary">"Open..." now uses Hildon file chooser dialog on Nokia 770
- Loading dictionary message display is reworked
- Deprecated Hildon API is no longer used

This version of SDict Viewer is packaged for Maemo 2.0 and includes several new things:
- A button is added to clear word input field
- Delayed processing of user input helps to avoid unnecessary
lookups and hopefully improves perceived performance
when working with large dictionaries
- Font can be selected for phonetic transcription (new menu Option>Phonetic Font...).
Doulos SIL (http://scripts.sil.org/DoulosSILfont) is a good
free unicode font that contains
International Phonetic Alphabet characters.
- Minor enhancements in article text formatting

Initial version of SDict Viewer (0.1.0) for Nokia 770 (Maemo 1.1) released today. Many thanks to Kasper Souren for helping me out with preparing .deb package for Maemo and to Iryna Gerasymova for the icon :)