I started up Babylon this morning to get the definition of a word, and it displayed this huge advertisement for the newest version, 5.0. But my question is, Why Upgrade?
Babylon is a very cool tool. I use it all the time. With Babylon running in the tray, you hold down the control key and right-click on any word on the screen. Any word, even in window title bars or graphics. Babylon uses some kind of OCR algorithm to read the word, then fetches the definition from its dictionary.
Well, it’s nice to have some translation features, but they are really not that handy. What I really want it to do is four things:
- Look up the definition of a word in a dictionary and display it
- Quickly tell me whether the word is spelled correctly.
- Search for the word in alternative reference resources (like the jargon file) and provide those definitions
- Show links (and URLs) to the first few Google results for the word
The first feature can be provided quite nicely through a public resource like Wikipedia. Since I’m always online when the computer is on, there is no reason not to use Wikipedia (or even some other online resource, like Google via the define:word operator, or dictionary.com) to give me definitions.
The second feature can be embedded with a dictionary file. The fact that Babylon takes so. freaking. long. to return a spelling result really bugs me.
The third feature should be set by the user, but with some pre-defined glossaries available. The Jargon file is a good resource. Communities with a special lexicon can create their own glossary for their special terms and publish is, just like Babylon does. Except this should work faster.
The fourth feature is something Babylon does, but poorly, much like all of its other features. It should display the search results inline by default, along with the URL and a link to the Google cache. A link at the bottom (after maybe four Google entries) should link to the full Google page of search results.
The fact that they want $59 for a new lifetime subscription is obviously irritating me. This software should be freeware. If anyone out there knows of an OCR VCL package for Delphi, sling it my way and we’ll talk about an open-source Babylon. The OCR part is the only thing preventing me from having done this ages ago.
