Welcome to the blog. The purpose of this blog is to provide a slightly more casual environment to communicate with users of jsqllc.com and the software produced here. For this first post, let's talk a little about how DianHua came into being.
In January 2008, I had the opportunity to travel to China for 3 weeks. Having had a bit of a knack at French during my school years, I decided to begin studying Mandarin several months before the trip. During that time, tools like MandarinTools.net and iPhoneCEDICT.com became invaluable. Unfortunately, those tools required Internet access which was not a reasonable option in China at the time. Paper dictionaries were slow and cumbersome, and the translation device I took to China seemed to be out-of-date. What I wanted while I was there was a simple English to Chinese dictionary I could take on my iPhone™ and use as needed to help me communicate. With the announcement of the iPhone SDK in the 2nd quarter of 2008, I started to work on what is now DianHua Dictionary.
Shortly after the first iPhone SDK beta, I began work on creating a searchable CEDICT for the iPhone. CEDICT is a public domain Chinese English Dictionary and is widely used on the Internet and in commercial/free software. Given the constraints of my day job and the rapid pace of the beta release schedule, I ceased work on the dictionary to wait until things stabilized.
Following the iPhone OS 2.0 release, I returned to work on the project. To my surprise, an unrelated Google search on my first day back led me to Rob Rohan's ill-fated iPhone CEDICT project, Xiao Ci Dian. It seems Mr. Rohan and I had been working on very similar applications concurrently. Since his was more advanced and closer to completion, I assumed I would sit back and see if his application met my needs. However in browsing his site, I discovered Xiao Ci Dian had died. It looks like several potential users were disappointed, but one can infer that Mr. Rohan had good reason, and he appears to be waiting for Android.
So, anyway, work has proceeded, and I'm hopeful DianHua won't suffer the same fate.
