We recently had our first public iPhone application finally accepted into the AppStore (for one of our clients). It’s the Oxford American College Dictionary AND Oxford American Thesaurus of Current English (what a mouthful) and we’re pretty proud of it. We managed to condense about ten pounds of printed material into one app that lives comfortably within the confines of your shiny new iPhone (or iPod Touch).
From the start we wanted to make it more stylized and legible than all the other iPhone dictionaries that are out there (and there are plenty). Most seem to just cram as much text into a page as possible, with no regard to typography, structure or semantics. Credit goes to Brandon Mathis for choosing a font and structure indicative of a print dictionary and one that’s easy to read on the iPhone.
We also tried our best to combine the feel of a printed page with usability enhancements the iPhone allows, like the ability to quick-scroll through to the various parts of speech and the ability to lookup a word definition from within any other definition. Check it out at the AppStore and let us know what you think.
Some technical details for the geeks out there:
- 400,000+ definition dictionary
- 350,000+ synonyms and antonyms
- 190Mb embedded SQLite database
- Live-searching of words
- UIWebView powered word views
Squeezing the type of performance out of SQLite that’s necessary for live-searching of hundreds of thousands of words was a bit of a chore, but it performs quite admirably now. Let us know if you’re doing something similar and need a tip or two. We’d be happy to help out.
By ryan | Development
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