Tensai

A Japanese Dictionary & Study Aid for Mac OS X

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.