Smartdict

A simple dictionary designed to improve your knowledge in foreign languages.

Smartdict 0.1.0 Is Released

I’m glad to announce Smartdict version 0.1.0 is released! There are number of improvements:

  • Automatic language detection based on alphabetic. (E.g. you are using English-Russian translation, it detects either Russian or English word is written)
  • LingvoYandex driver for English-Russian translations. You can configure drivers in file ~/.smartdict/configuration.yml in drivers section.
  • Fixed number of GUI bugs.

Installation

1

gem install smartdict

Backward compatibility note

The DB schema was changed. If you’ve used Smartdict before please remove ~/.smartdict directory to make it regenerate DB schema and configuration file.

Screenshots

Smartdict GUI

To run the application use smartdict-gtk command. Smartdict

Smartdict CLI

To use command line version it’s enough to have smartdict-core gem installed. Smartdict

Smartdict Introdution

Hello everyone. My name is Sergey Potapov, I am a ruby developer and the creator/maintainer of Smartdict dictionary. In this post I’m gonna tell you about the intention of Smartdict project and its main goals.

History

I live in Kharkov(Ukraine), so I am not a native English speaker. Learning English a few years ago I’ve come up with idea: I have to write every new English word down to memorize it latter, but it would be really cool to automate the process. That has intended me to start developing the software like Smartdict. I don’t wanna learn all words in my English textbook, I wanna learn words which I face in my daily practice.

Probably there already were some similar programs but I had some special requirements:

  • It should be free and open source.
  • It should be compatible to Unix like operation system, since I’m a Linux user.
  • It should provide some core library, since I wanna use it within Vim.
  • It should be possible to fetch data from different sources like GoldenDict does.

I started developing. Sometimes I gave it up for a few months, then I came back. In April 08, 2012 I released the very first version on Github and Rubygems. It doesn’t look like a lot of people used it, but I got some feedback from my friends.

Technologies

I’ve decided to use the next technologies to achieve my goals:

  • Programming language: ruby
  • GUI: GTK2, but it’s possible to use another GUI libraries as well.
  • Data storage: SQLite with DataMapper as an ORM.

I will write another blog post for developers where I’ll dive deeper in internal structure of the project and technologies.

The current goals:

  • Provide ability to track and learn translated words.
  • Integration with Anki. That would be a really sweet thing!
  • Create a Vim plugin based on smartdict-core.

Afterwords

I know it’s a short introduction. More information will come soon. There is a lot of work needs to be done. If you interesting in taking a part in the development process please let me know, I’ll appreciate your help!

Thanks.

P.S. Feel free to correct my English.