February 21, 2008

Mobile version of the dictionary

An initial mobile phone version of the French dictionary is now available:
  • The mobile version is designed to work on phones that support WAP 1.1
  • The mobile version contains some stripped-down entries to cope better with the smaller screen of mobile phones
  • At present, only French-English lookups are supported. (English-French coming soon!)
  • It is free to access (other than your mobile operator's cost to access the Internet on your phone!)
  • Suggestions are welcome as comments on this blog entry!

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Neil,

I tried the WAP dictionary but I don't get the "Lookup" button.
I'm using a Blackberry 8830.
Send me a note if you need more info.
adrianvattuone at yahoo.ca

PS: your work it's great !!!

Neil Coffey said...

Thank you for letting me know about this. I'll freely confess that I've tested the mobile version on various mobile phones but not on a BlackBerry (simply because I don't have one to hand!). I'll see if I can investigate with an emulator and get back to you with further news!
Neil

Aaron Barnhart said...

Hi Neil - no, it's not just the BlackBerry either! I have a LG Dare smartphone from VZW. It has a HTML browser. And it too lacks a Lookup button.

My guess is a ton of current phones aren't getting access to what I'm sure is a fine dictionary because of this.

Neil Coffey said...

Thanks for this feedback. I've made a change that I'm hoping will get the mobile dictionary working!

Anonymous said...

The web site is very useful Neil, thanks for it.

With the mobile site I get the lookup button on my Nokia N95, but when I look up a word I only get a very short list of meanings back. For "demain", the mobile version returns "tomorrow", the main web version returns "1 demain Adverb (a) tomorrow; ~ matin/soir tomorrow morning/evening or night; le monde de ~ tomorrow's world"

Alan Peery

Neil Coffey said...

Hi Alan,

This is actually a deliberate decision. The idea I had was that with the mobile version, people wouldn't want to be scrolling down long entries on a small screen, and that in typical use with a mobile phone, it would be more for "emergency" lookups than people doing tasks where they need detailed translations.

If in fact you or other users do need the "full" entries on your mobile phone, I'd be interested to know -- I'm sure I could cater for this.

Neil