Mathieu Blondel

Fantasdic 1.0-beta4 released

I’ve just released Fantasdic 1.0-beta4. Fantasdic is a dictionary application that uses the network to look up words. For example, nihongobenkyo.org is a server that provides Japanese dictionaries. Add it to the settings in Fantasdic and voilà, you can now look up Japanese words using Fantasdic. Another well-known server with tons of dictionaries is dict.org.

What’s new with this release?

- Print support.
- New match dialog.
- New history dialog.
- Can choose fonts in the preferences.
- Zoom+, Zomm-, Zoom normal buttons.
- New “Zoom over character” dialog.
- Better handling of connections and cache.
- Better support of authentication.
- SOCKS 5 Proxy support.
- New application icon.
- Various bug fixes.
- Better MS Windows support and easy to install archive.

- French translation updated (Mathieu Blondel).
- Brazilian Portuguese translation updated (Alexandre Cavedon).
- Swedish translation updated (Daniel Nylander).
- Occitan translation updated partially (Yannig Marchegay).

Source: fantasdic-1.0-beta4.tar.gz [123 KB]
Windows: fantasdic-1.0-beta4-mswin32.zip [15.5 MB]

Version name

Back one year and a half ago when I started Fantasdic, I quite underestimated the number of new potential features and I didn’t expect to spend too much time on it so I released it as 1.0-beta1. Now I’m realizing that I made a mistake. As a result, even though the versions are marked 1.0-beta*, I’m still adding a lot of new features with each release. It doesn’t make sense! Unfortunately, it’s too late to change the version because some distributions are packaging Fantasdic already so I have to stick with it. Lesson learned.

Nihongo Benkyo abandoned

[I used to maintain an application called Nihongo Benkyo which I abandoned in favor of Fantasdic]

A few people have emailed me to tell me that they wished Nihongo Benkyo had not been abandoned. Well, the more I work on Fantasdic the more I’m happy with my choice. One of the reason for that is that 80% of the code in Fantasdic is user interface code. If making a dictionary application means spending so much time on user interface, I prefer making a general-purpose dictionary application. The second reason is that Nihongo Benkyo used to use a database on the local disk. As the developer, the network approach is more flexible because I don’t have to care about data. As a user, this allows to always have an up-to-date version of the dictionaries and add new dictionaries very easily. The third reason is that I’m using Fantasdic on a daily basis and definitely love it! If you liked Nihongo Benkyo, you should have a look at the Fantasdic + nihongobenkyo.org duo :-).

Lexicon

The one feature that I’m still missing is the personal lexicon. The personal lexicon would be like your own dictionary that you would maintain with the words that you want to learn. Basically, five dialogs are needed:
- an “Add word dialog”, that you would open for adding a word that is worth knowing after you looked it up in Fantasdic;
- a “Word list view dialog”, this dialog would be used to search words in the lexicon;
- a “Drill dialog”, this dialog would be used to revise words in the lexicon, using leitner’s system,
- “Import” and “Export” dialogs.

A good candidate for storing the lexicon would be KirbyBase or SQLite if KirbyBase doesn’t scale well.

I don’t plan to work on that anytime soon (currently learning with pen and paper for my upcoming stay in Japan, more on that later ;-)). If you’re willing to help with the lexicon, drop me a line at mathieu !ât! mblondel *döt* org. Basically, the lexicon could be developed separately at first and then merged to Fantasdic.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 9th, 2007 at 12:30 am and is filed under Projects, In English. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.