Monday 15 March, 2010

Application to fetch Wiktionary definitions

I am preparing for GRE, and am using Anki for learning. However, the definitions Anki gives are not very good (that is, the GRE 'card deck' available to use within Anki is not very good), so for every word I'm having to refer Wiktionary to understand it better.

I got lazy to every time copy the word, type wiktionary in Firefox's address bar, and edit the URL to paste the new word. So, I created a small application to do most of the grunt work for me.

Copying the word with Ctrl-C I still have to do, but the rest of the work I can now invoke with a simple shortcut Ctrl-Alt-D. D for Define.

The application executable is available at http://github.com/sundaryourfriend/DefineMyWord/blob/master/DefineMyWord/bin/Debug/DefineMyWord.exe, though this one is built for my machine (64-bit Intel) and might not run on others. Give it a try if you feel like experimenting.

I created this app in C# to learn the language a little (learnt very little of it though). I've placed the code in a Git repository at http://github.com/sundaryourfriend/DefineMyWord. Yeah, I call it DefineMyWord for now, until I get a better name. :)

It's probably terrible C# code, and there are a lot of rough edges: I couldn't get Alt-D to make it focus on the address bar (any help on this is welcome), it doesn't store previously opened URLs for now, etc.

After I was deep into creating this app, I realized I could have made a much simpler app to open the Wiktionary page in Firefox when a shortcut was pressed, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. However, I was too much into the project already, so I told myself that this way I'd be able to add features easily whenever I need. Hope I do add some.

2 comments:

Prasanth Guruprasad said...

So, When are you planning to take the GRE

PRAVIN CHAN said...

hey this is nice one...

but still better easier apps are already available