Daring Fireball posted today about a dictionary app that now has an iOS version, Kotoba. Apple won’t let it in the App Store because no app is allowed to access the built in dictionaries (probably licensing), so the developer released the source and has instructions to install in on your iPhones yourself. Looks really easy:
Quoth the instructions:
Well, that didn’t go well. I guess I used magic punctuation or words. (I’m becoming increasingly unfond of discourse.) Trying again a little differently:
Daring Fireball posted today about a dictionary app that now has an iOS version, Kotoba. Apple won’t let it in the App Store because no app is allowed to access the built in dictionaries (probably licensing), so the developer released the source and has instructions to install in on your iPhones yourself. Looks really easy:
snip
Installation (iPhone only)
If you have Xcode:
Clone or download Kotoba from GitHub.
Open code/Kotoba.xcodeproj in Xcode.
Connect your iPhone via USB.
Select your iPhone from the scheme selector.
Product > Run
end snip
I’m also dictionary addicted, so I’ll probably be trying this out, though mostly as proof of concept. I hugely prefer American Heritage to Oxford. So much history and origins, and all of those lovely usage notes. If only ibooks would call on external dictionary apps–Instapaper was able to do it, so it’s not an ‘iOS can’t’ thing.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2018/06/19/kotoba
If anyone has issues with Discourse, please message me privately or post in the Site Feedback category. Nearly everything in Discourse is configurable, so if there’s something it’s doing that’s annoying, I can probably stop it. (As opposed to Mailman, where everything it did that was annoying—and there was a lot that I had to fight with on a regular basis—had been so for years and was impossible to address in any way.)
We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread…
Don’t apps compiled and installed by Xcode expire after a week? I thought since the capability is meant for developing the apps, they don’t keep working indefinitely.
BTW, I read TidBITS Talk by email but use the web to write. Discourse formats things well but I like to see what the end result is like before I submit it. I can also have more fine-grained control over quoting others, though I quote a lot less than on the Mailman list.