0.6.0b2 released

September 6th, 2006

I just put up a new beta build of the ZDT up tonight. Again, this is not a release version, just something for people to play with! You can download it from here.

The main new feature is the experimental IME support. It is based off the work of John Burket’s CantoInput who in turn credits Aaron Chan’s HanConv and the frequency data from http://technology.chtsai.org/charfreq/. I know there are still some quirks in it but I think it works well enough to play with.

Instructions: Press Ctrl-I toggle in and out of IME mode. This enables certain fields like the Dictionary search, the Annotator and the Add Entry dialog simplified field to accept chinese input. Now you can type some pinyin, like “guo” and a list of possible character choices will popup. Select a character by typing the corresponding number. At the far right, it shows you how many more “pages” of choices are available. Use the ‘]’ key to move forward a page and the ‘[‘ to move back a page. Worthwhile feature? I’m not sure yet, but it was interesting trying to implement. I’m interested in hearing your opinions.

A couple of other interesting fixes were also added to this build. First, the Definition test has been fixed so that you shouldn’t get into the state where a card looks like it has more than one right answer. I’ve also removed most of the restrictions on the definition field of an entry. Now you can pretty much put anything in your definitions except a forward slash, which is the internal delimiter for definitions. Please let me know if this causes any problems as well.

Entry Filed under: ZDT