[ghewgill]

Great execution, I like the "always-on" dictionary definition panel.

I built an offline mobile dictionary app about 10 years ago for a language where there was no existing app - New Zealand Sign Language. Fortunately, the dictionary work had already been done by the Deaf Studies Research Unit at Victoria University of Wellington [1]. They kindly gave permission for me to use the dictionary data (and images for every entry, because it's a visual language). As a result they properly licensed the dictionary data as CC-BY-NC-SA, so anybody can use it now.

All the dictionary entries and images were built in to the initial download of the app. This was a bit amusing in 2012 when there were still 50 MB app download size limits, I had to sacrifice some image quality (converting PNG to JPEG, among other things) to get the file size small enough. I had always intended to add an optional download of all the sign videos, but never did get around to it, and online on-demand access to the videos always seemed to work well enough for users. (My #1 user is my wife, I built this app at the start of her studies and she is now a qualified NZSL interpreter and still uses the app every day.)

Since then, the DSRU has done a lot of work on the online dictionary web site [2], and I have passed on the responsiblity of app maintenance onto them. All their work (website, apps, conversion scripts) is now open source [3].

1: https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/lals/centres-and-institutes/dsru

2: https://www.nzsl.nz/

3. https://github.com/ODNZSL