Re: Announcing gSho

[Nils Roland Barth <jmdict.nbarth@********>]

Hi Matthew,

Apologies for the extremely late reply!
I finally got around to checking out the cleverly named gSho!
First impression is that it’s an elegant but quite basic
dictionary – certainly v1.0. I’m excited to see how it develops!
(…and of course I bought a paid copy to show my support ;)

Search-as-you-type is a great feature and absolutely
essential (a huge complaint with Aedict).
I don’t have a tablet, but having a separate
tablet-optimized (larger/wider) interface is v. good!
The tagging is also rather elegant.

Room for improvement (likely know these):
* V. fast searches
Searching is not especially fast – there’s noticeable lag,
even on an HTC One. It’s reasonably fast, but *really* fast
searching, which you can see in Droidwing, for instance
(for EPWING dictionaries), requires an index, but yield
basically instant searches.

* Tag import/export
Basic tagging is find for maybe 10 words (“new words I’ve
seen today”), but for advance usage and larger lists (100
words in the new lesson, or the 10,000 words of one’s total
vocabulary), being able to import and export lists is
essential.
(This is the killer feature for me, and if it had this I’d
start using gSho as my day-to-day dictionary.)

* Dictionary version information/manual updating
What version is the dictionary?
Is it updated? Daily? Annually? Never?
Maybe this is all magically handled in the background, or
maybe it’s just a fixed version from one day – I can’t tell.
Making this visible – and ensuring that the dictionary data
can be updated (directly from the JMDict server or a manually
downloaded file) – would assure people that the dictionary
is up-to-date, and mean that it would continue to be
up-to-date even if the app itself isn’t updated for a while,
or even is abandoned (a serious problem with Aedict and JED).

…and of course kanji search (by component especially),
advanced search (at least: ends with, contains), and
more customizability (v. useful for frequent users – font
size, color, turning off the Internet search, etc.).

It’s a great start, and pretty comfortably usable for light
use; hope to see it fill out over time!

  ~nils