I just uploaded the latest beta build to Sourceforge. You can download it from here. This will be the last build before the 0.6.0 final release.
I’ve mainly focused on the flashcards for this build. There’s now a new preference located in the Flashcards preferences for showing traditional characters and simplified characters at the same time. I think I’ve also improved the UI somewhat now. If any of the content of the flashcards becomes too wide, it should now automatically wrap to the next line instead of cutting itself off. If the content becomes too tall, then a vertical scrollbar will appear, indicating that you should probably resize the view to see all the content. I know, it’s small stuff, but it wasn’t totally obvious (to me at least) how to get this to work properly using SWT. I’ll probably do a small writeup to show how I accomplished this.
September 27th, 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.
September 6th, 2006