about

CocoaCEDICT provides an interface to a Chinese-English dictionary.

The program is free software, and released under the GNU General Public License.

This is a complete rewrite of the old Perl version, CocoaPerlCEDICT. It's been rewritten in Objective C, and now uses Core Data. As a result it's considerably faster, and uses much less memory. It no longer has any external dependencies either - just download and run it.

Features:

• Search by: Any section, English, Pinyin, Pinyin with tone, traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, or any Chinese.
• Filter results: exact match, "begins with", "ends with", "partial match"
• Optionally show tone marks instead of digits. Example: pin1 yin1 becomes pīn yīn
• Search history: Remembers search term, section, and filter. Go forward, back, or any place in the history.
• Separate font faces and sizes for Chinese and Roman (English, Pinyin)
• Convenient font resizing with sliders on the main window
• Resize and rearrange the columns. The application remembers these settings and restores them each time you run it. It also remembers window size and position, as well as your last search parameters.
• Control-click an entry to bring up a copy menu. This allows you to quickly and easily copy any part of the definition, or the entire definition, to the system's pasteboard.
  The first item in the menu is always the section of the definition you clicked on.
• Keyboard shortcuts to switch between search parameters.

screenshot

requirements

• OS X 10.4 (Tiger).

  This program makes use of Core Data, and as such it cannot run on earlier version of OS X. If you would like something that will work on 10.3 (Panther), take a look at the old version of this program, CocoaPerlCEDICT. However, I will no longer maintain that program (plus this version is loads better anyway).

download

application version 3.0.1 (1.8 MB - contains the dictionary data)
source code version 3.0.1 (2.5 MB - contains the dictionary data, original CEDICT dictionary file, as well as a simple Core Data utility application to build the dictionary data)

Update: I've haphazardly thrown the project in Google Code, and it's available at http://code.google.com/p/cocoacedict/. If you want to do any development, this is probably the place to start.

Older versions can be found in the code directory

additional thanks and credits

The CEDICT is a Chinese/English dictionary project started by Paul Denisowski. More information and the original dictionary files can be found here.

CocoaCEDICT uses a class called RowResizableTableView written by Evan Jones. It allows variable row heights within an NSTableView (he's also written a similar class for NSOutlineViews)
Check it out here

License and Copyright

CocoaCEDICT is Copyright © 2005, Mark A. Stratman <mark@sporkstorms.org>

It is licensed under the GNU General Public License.
You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.