So here I am sitting in my cubicle minding my own business when I spot a guy from the marketing team heading towards me. Yup, the author of the second post below this one, if you’d like to have a face to picturize. Now this can’t be good, I think to myself, and before I could even register another thought he comes up to me and says “Could you write something about WordDigest for our blog?” That effectively got my mood from “Yeah! It’s the weekend!” to a complete void. I’ve heard of writers’ block but let me tell you it also affects people like me who well, don’t essentially write for a living. So, after unsuccessfully scribbling around for a while, I pick up an iPod touch and start using
WordDigest with the hope that the very product we worked so hard on to bring to life would now inspire me to write a few words about it.
I look up ‘digest’ and of all the information about the word presented to me, this is what catches my eye,
digest (n) ’something that is compiled (as into a single book or file)’
And a digest of words is exactly what we wanted to accomplish in creating WordDigest, which in short, is an application that combines the functionality of a Dictionary, Thesaurus and a Spell Checker all into one package. Now that’s a lot of features for one application and having them all while still keeping the user interface clean, simple and intuitive was quite a challenge. We really had to head back to the drawing board time and again to get things just right. Another thing that managed to give us sleepless nights was managing the size of the application. Going from a hysterical “70MB!!! You gotta be kidding me.” to a more sedate “18MB, That’s acceptable.” was quite a ride.
Getting into the features, all the words in the dictionary and thesaurus are hyperlinked and I’ve realized it’s fun to just randomly follow a trail of words not knowing when one that you haven’t heard of appears before you and takes you by surprise. If you find it interesting, just mark it as a favorite and move on. If you are not sure how a word is spelled, just trust the wisdom of Spell Check to give you the right spelling along with suggestions, all linked back to the dictionary for easy reference. You can even look up words on Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Answers.com and you’ll see that the search results are optimized so that you don’t have to scroll around, pinch and zoom to really find what you are looking for.
WordDigest can be purchased on the App Store. The actual cost is $3.99, but as an introductory offer you can purchase it for just $1.99 for a limited period. So, grab a copy now and make the best out of it.
The process of creating this application, right from deciding what features we wanted, then investigating how best they could be implemented to the actual release was a valuable learning process for the whole team and lots of fun. We hope that it’s a joy to use and serves the purpose it was meant to serve. We welcome your suggestions, feedback, feature requests, and comments to improve WordDigest. So until next time, its adiós from me. Take care and have fun.
