Radheef for OSX dictionary.app (beta)

Before I say anything more... BETA means I want YOU...to give me feedback.. got it? alright let's proceed.

A few months ago I twought (thought + tweeted) that I, for one, would like to have the radheef available on the native mac dictionary app. This was met with some positive response (yes you @bandey); which motivated me for about 15 minutes until I started playing Uncharted 2… and everything went downhill from there.

I had already done something similar for linux (which I talked about here and here), so I figured it wouldn't be too difficult. So tonight - since I'm bored and have nothing better to do - after an hour or two of toiling around I've managed to get it up and running.

point to note here BEFORE people start asking me how to setup thaana keyboard or something stupid like that, you CAN use ASCII to search. (as in you can search for 'mwkunu' or 'މަކުނު' to the same effect. Also not that you don't have to type in the entire word (dictionary.app does prefix matching on the headword against the query)

screenshots ahoy! Scroll all the way down for the download link (only if you read the above of course) and setup instructions.



edit: new easy to use installer HERE

the dictionary database can be downloaded HERE..HERE HERE MIYOTHEE

extract the zip file and copy the "dv_MV radheef.dictionary" file to either ~/Library/Dictionaries (for single user) OR /Library/Dictionaries (for all users).

that's all folks.

Messing around with AppleScript

Ever since I made the decision to buy a Mac I've wanted to mess around with apples excellent application scripting system (i.e AppleScript). I finally got around to it today and now am throughly impressed by the number things you can accomplish with it.

Anyway as my sort of "hello world" task, I've written up this little script down here which will "speak" or "Read Aloud" the number of unread messages in your "Mail" (assuming you're using Mail.app - which you should) and the sender and subject of each unread message. This combined with the impressive new text-to-speech voices in OSX Lion makes it rather useful. I will now have all my emails read to me by a sexy indian lady on my computer (aka sangeetha!)

I did some googling around but didn't find anybody else doing this so I figured I'd share it here.

the script!

tell application "Mail"
 
 set unreadCount to unread count of inbox
 set theMessages to (messages of inbox whose read status is false)
 
 if unreadCount > 0 then
  say ("you have," & unreadCount & ",new messages")
  
  repeat with msg in theMessages
   say ("message, from" & (sender of msg) & ". Saying" & (subject of msg))
   delay 1
  end repeat
  
 else
  say "you have no, new messages."
 end if
 
 
end tell

I've also compiled it into an alfred extension which you can download from here cheers