Tensai

A Japanese Dictionary & Study Aid for Mac OS X

After much wait and little fanfare, Tensai 0.93 is released!

There are two major changes in this release. First, it’s fully shareware now; so if you use Tensai please buy a license. I’m starting it at an introductory price of $30, with the intention of raising that price as I implement more planned features. Unlicensed copies of Tensai are limited to a max vocab list size of 10 entries. If you’ve been using an earlier version, don’t worry. Your existing vocab lists won’t be changed by 0.93. You will no longer, however, be able to add any entries to those lists over the limit. Unless you buy a license, of course. The limitations placed on unlicensed users will change with each release as new features are implemented.

Second, vocab lists are much improved. Addition, deletion, multiple selection. Entry dragging can start from anywhere not occupied by text. Selection can be changed/grown by arrow and modifier keys. Try command-clicking and shift-clicking entries. Also try pressing the delete key when a vocab list’s entries are selected.

Oh yes, and dragging and dropping entries to text editors gives you nicely formatted plain text copies of the entries.

Enjoy!

I’ve stopped requiring registration for comments and started using Akismet. It seems to be doing a pretty good job so far.

Comment spam is becoming a problem, so I’m requiring that people create accounts and login to post. Sorry for the extra hassle.

Quick question. If Tensai had back/forward buttons like a web browser, would you rather they move you within the active dictionary, across all of your searches, or across all of your actions in Tensai, looking through vocab lists as well?

Say you’ve done a search in Tensai and now you want to drag & drop some entries into a text editor as plain text. In 0.92 and earlier doing this would net you some weird URL type thing like tensai://JMdict:ent_seq@entries/;1405810. Well no longer! Read more »

Hello world! I’m really grateful for all of the positive feedback I’ve received for Tensai 0.92. I’m sorry I haven’t had the time to respond to everyone, but I assure you I read them all.

In particular, I’ve received quite a few requests for a donations button. I like money as much as the next guy, and I especially like the idea of your money becoming my monies, but I think taking donations would unnecessarily complicate the situation. Tensai 1.0 will be shareware, so I ask you to keep your charity in check until then.

Tensai 0.93 is coming along nicely, and I think everyone will be pleased with the new features. I’ve recently overcome some technical hurdles with its development, and can focus on fine tuning things to your liking. I’ll be posting requests for comments on upcoming features leading up to the release of 0.93, so please stay tuned and opinionated.

This weighs in as a relatively small update. For a full list of what’s new in this release, go here. Key points of interest in 0.92:

• Tensai has an icon. I’ve received many kind offers of original icons, but I’ve resolved to make Tensai 100% me — at least up to version 1.0. So while I appreciate all of your efforts, this will be Tensai’s icon at least up to 1.0. I’d appreciate any comments people have on the icon, as I’m not sure how well it fits in with Apple’s HI Guidelines or your docks.
• Has a real contextual menu in the results.
• Text size of results can be adjusted from the View menu.
• Result counts only show up after you hit enter. I didn’t feel the 0.91 way was very intuitive. You can still refine or cancel the search if it’s going to return too many results.
• Results are more readable and include more information.
• The result count is in the window title, not in a status bar at the bottom. No more up-down-up eye movement than necessary.
• Results can be copied and pasted without losing their formatting (e.g. the commas, colons, and semicolons won’t get stripped).

This is not a Universal Binary. It reportedly works fine under Rosetta.

My New Year’s resolution? Get Tensai to 1.0.

I’ve made little progress since releasing Tensai 0.91 last October. As a result, Tensai 0.92 won’t be a very dramatic change in functionality. However, I feel it’s important for me to get an updated version out there with sensible search behavior.

In 0.91 I messed around with semi-live searching, pre-fetching results as you typed but not formatting them until enter was hit. I haven’t gotten much feedback on that change, but after some reflection I decided the 0.90 behavior was just much more intuitive and focused. If anyone likes the way it works now in 0.91, please make yourself heard.

So just to be clear, the difference is:

Where ‘find’ means it updates the result count and ‘display’ means it actually displays the results themselves.

So, yeah. I’m curious to know if people have any strong feelings one way or the other about this.