Quote:
Originally Posted by kguil
- There doesn't seem to be a way to programmatically instruct iOS to launch the dictionary for a specific language. The dictionary will only show for your locale (language in iPad's settings). I stand to be corrected. Anyone know better?
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I certainly hope you're wrong there, Kris!
That would be an incredibly silly arrangement on the part of iOS, if that were the case. Mainly because of Stanza, I haven't upgraded to iOS 6 so far on any of my devices, so I can't test yet how exactly the dictionaries in iOS 6 behave. However, I can't seriously believe that Apple doesn't realize that people often read foreign-language books, and Apple can't really expect all of their customers to be 100% strictly mono-lingual, never trying to learn a foreign language, etc.
Readers need the ability to easily switch between dictionaries for various languages on-the-fly.
Again, the Kindle app leads the way here. With a single tap of your finger on the "i" button, you can switch from the active dictionary to any of the other 9 available foreign-language Kindle dictionaries. That friend I mentioned who uses eBookMobi just wrote me a few minutes ago:
"I can't understand why app developers don't take a look at the dictionaries in the Kindle app and imitate them in their own apps. It's not only about the range of available dictionaries, but also about the way they work." And this is certainly true. The Kindle app is fabulous in that you only need to tap & hold a word, and the dictionary definition instantly shows up at the bottom or at the top of your screen. That's a
huge difference compared to having to tap a specific button yet
another time to launch the dictionary itself. Plus, like I mentioned, you can search within Kindle dictionaries, and you can look up words used in the definitions themselves. The built-in iOS dictionary allows none of these things, and is therefore distinctly inferior compared to Kindle dictionaries.
In short, Kris, if you could imitate (the more, the better) the Kindle app's dictionaries' functionality in Marvin somehow, it would definitely be nice.
Kindle is the undisputed leader in that department.
As to the Wiktionary idea, I definitely think having access to Wiktionary would be better than having nothing. On the other hand, the quality of Wiktionary dictionaries is typically sub-par.
There's a superb Russian iOS app called Lingvo (from the makers of FineReader OCR) that offers first-rate dictionaries from world-renowned publishers, both
definition and
translation dictionaries. I have purchased the Lingvo app itself and several dictionaries within it as in-app purchases, and I'm extremely happy with their quality. Now, if it were somehow possible to make the Lingvo app's definitions and translations pop up within Marvin, that would be the best of both worlds! As it is, I need to copy a word in Marvin first, then switch to the Lingvo app and launch the dictionary there.
