Download JDictionary v0.2
11.7 MB free download (Universal) - May 10, 2008
JDictionary is at first glance, a simple application that uses a dictionary derived from the JMDict dictionary file to lookup Japanese words and give their English definitions. There are a lot of great online dictionaries, but looking up something in a local dictionary can be done much more quickly than performing a lookup over the web.
The real reason I wrote JDictionary isn't for the window you see on the right at all, but instead, for the mini dictionary panel you see below.
The mini dictionary allows you to look up words almost anywhere on the system extremely quickly. You can look up a word simply by placing the cursor over the word you want to look up, then pressing command-control-R. (This is inspired by the dictionary panel built in to Mac OS X that allows you to look up English words in a similar manner using command-control-D). Because it was designed to look up words as they appear in writing, it can (usually) extract the part of the text that is a word, even when the word isn't in its "dictionary" form.
The mini dictionary is enabled by default and will start (in the background) as soon as you launch the main application. It will continue running in the background even after the application has been quit or the system has been restarted. To disable it, you need to turn it off in the preferences. If for some reason the mini dictionary doesn't work, launching the main application will usually fix things.
JDictionary relies on features introduced in Mac OS X v10.4, and so it will only work on 10.4 or later. I don't have access to a computer running Mac OS 10.4 to test on, so if you experience any problems, please send me any relevant crash logs and a description of how to reproduce the problem and I will attempt to fix it.
The Mini Dictionary relies on the accessibility features built into Mac OS X. These features allow it to retrieve the text under your cursor. Unfortunately, Safari's implementation of the accessibility doesn't seem to have been designed with Japanese text support in mind, and the panel may show up in odd locations or not at all on some pages. I can't figure out how to work around these problems; hopefully a future release of Safari will improve these issues. For now, this means that the panel won't work at all on some pages. (I've noticed that it doesn't work on a lot of blogs.) If you have any advice on how to work around these issues, please contact me.