wordroom's Introduction

WordRoom

A personal dictionary app written with Pythonista for iOS

Introduction

A while ago, I wanted an app that would let me write my own personal dictionary. None of the other apps on the market did exactly what I had in mind, so I created my own.

You can think of this as a cross between a dictionary app and a notes app. Every time you look up a word, you are given a textbox where you can write whatever you want about it. All of your words with notes are stored so you can access them later. If you open a word again, then your notes will be the first thing you see. The dictionary definition is secondary.

Why?

Personally, I started jotting down interesting words a while ago, but I wanted to remember more than just their definitions. I started taking notes on where I had heard the word, any interesting contexts, the time period when it was written, and so on.

But I can imagine that this app could have pratical uses beyond the curiosity of a logophile. A fantasy writer could keep track of words in a fictional world. A student could study terminology.

There are many excellent dictionary apps available today, and it's not my intention to reinvent their good work. I'm particularly fond of Terminology. I've designed WordRoom to be more of a companion to other apps rather than a replacement.

Installation

Download Pythonista for iOS.
Download the latest release of WordRoom to Pythonista. You can easily install it by copying and pasting this line of code into your Pythonista console:

import requests as r; exec(r.get('https://bit.ly/2tFpuZh').text)

Run WordRoom.py in the WordRoom directory.

Tips

WordRoom includes a basic offline dictionary from this repository. To get access to the complete online definitions, you'll need WordNik API Key, which is free for personal use. Once you have one, follow the instructions in WordRoom.

To keep the code light, I haven't written any features like tags, categories, or favorites. If you want a better way of organizing your words, you can take advantage of the search feature. It will recognize #HashTags in your notes.

Contributing

If you think this app is useful and you want to make it better, feel free to open an issue or a pull request. I'm open to suggestions for new features.

There is probably a lot of code that could be improved. I made most decisions based on what was easy for me to do at the time. If you have any questions about the code, please get in touch.

License

Licensed under the MIT License. See the included LICENSE file for details.

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wordroom's Issues

Add Application Extension and Widget Support

These probably won't be hard to add, but I haven't gotten to them yet because there's a Pythonista bug which prevents them from working when a script is stored in iCloud, which is my preferred place to keep WordRoom.

iPad UI

The WordRoom UI is only optimized for iPhone. There needs to be an iPad UI as well, preferably with consideration for split-views.

iCloud Sync Can Lead to Data Loss

If WordRoom is stored on iCloud and running on two devices at once (e.g. an iPhone and an iPad) data will only be saved from one of them.

Right now, WordRoom only reads data on launch. Every time it writes data, it overwrites the data on the disc. If iCloud syncs new data between those two events, then the new data will be overwritten.

This issue is most likely to effect users who leave WordRoom running in the background on one device and then open it on another. A workaround for now is to always manually close the WordRoom UI when you're done using it.

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