The gWaei Project Homepage, Latest Release 1.0

What is gWaei?

gWaei is a Japanese-English dictionary program for the GNOME desktop. It is made to be a modern drop in replacement for Gjiten with many of the same features. The dictionary files it uses are from Jim Breen's WWWJDIC project and are installed separately through the program.

Features

Easy dictionary installation with a click of a button.
Support for searching using regular expressions.
Streams results so the interface is never frozen.
Click Kanji in the results pane to look information on it.
Simple interface that makes sense.
Intelligent design. Tab switches dictionaries.
Organizes relevant matches to the top of the results.

Developement Blog

Read my blog to find out about the developement status of the next gWaei release! It's where I post my thoughts on the current problems I'm tackling and where I'm going to go next with the program.

Release News

June 14, 2009

Version 1.0 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

Yay! It finally happened. This will be the stable version for a while. I'm a bit sad that I had to drop support for Debian 5.0 (Lenny) though. Fortunately, it will be compatible with the next version. The next stable version of gWaei will be 1.1. If you want to see something fixed for it, please submit a bug report! gWaei 2.0 will have new features, a reworked interface, and hopefully be all around better and more polished.

May 27, 2009

Version 1.0rc1 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

There were some small tweaks to the progam's code to get it to compile under Windows correctly. There was also a small memory leak when opening the help menu. This will be the last revision before 1.0!

May 16, 2009

Version 1.0b3 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

Small changes. Radicals have been reordered and some holes filled. The number separators for the radicals have been made red to make them more visible. RPM building has been slightly reworked. Libgnome is no longer a dependancy.

April 25, 2009

Version 1.0b1 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

Most important thing fixed in this release is a minor buffer overflow that caused the program to crash on Ubuntu 9. I have made some headway on MS Windows support, but still am not 100% there yet. The last important change is that when gnome is turned off in the configuration for the build, GConf is no longer a forced dependancy.

Onward-ho to 1.0!

March 29, 2009

Version 0.15.4 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

This release brings some small changes and fixes. I have to thank all of the contributors who helped. I have never had so many people helping by submitting bugs, translations, and fixes. Thank you all!

The major notables this time are a reworked Radical Search Tool window and a fix so that Mac OS X users should be bale to compile the program.

I want to eventually release a 1.0 version of gWaei so that people have something stable to use. In order to do this, I want to squash the last of the large bugs and make the program usable on MS Windows in the basic sense. If anyone wants to help, email me or contact me through my blog.

March 14, 2009

Version 0.15.3 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

This was a quick bugfix release. There were a number of things that were horribly wrong, so this update is recommended for everyone. Particularly people who search when using a non-japanese locale and who need to install dictionaries through the built in mechanism.

Fabrizio also offered an updated Italian translation (thanks fabrizio!) and the internal error system has been further upgraded windows support improved somewhat.

March 13, 2009

Version 0.15.2 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

A number of tweaks have happened. A lot of polish has been added to the console interface. There is still a large bug that I need to take care of that I noticed today. (Read more about it on my blog.)

Debian users can now compile gWaei without hacks. Also, MS Windows compatibility is coming along...but still isn't there yet. 4pack donated a Spanish translation to gWaei which is very nice.

March 1, 2009

Version 0.15.1 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

Bug fix release! This should fix the issue some people were having doing searches that contained kanji.

Other changes include gconf being abstracted out. It is possible to compile the program withotu gconf available...though it isn't recommended. Also, the deb installs and uninstalls now exit cleanly with no errors.

Last, an updated italian translation has now been added! (Thanks Fabrizio!)

February 28, 2009

Version 0.15.0 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

The newest version of gWaei has finally arrived! This version took so long because it was edging on being a total rewrite. Many of the dangling variables that I had floating around are now neatly put away into C structs.

On the front end, there is a link saying "Where can I get other dictionaries?" This is meant to help people find other dictionaries that may work with gwaei.

Last, and the most interesting, gtk support is now OPTIONAL in gWaei. You can access most of the program's features through the terminal now! The program creates a symbalic link called waei on installation that can be used to access all of this console goodness.

January 26, 2009

Version 0.14.0 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

New features! The preferences dialog has recieved an options boost. There is a new advanced tab. On of the most interesting options is the ability to adjust the highlight colors.

The search engine has been upgraded a bit. Bugs fixed, works better with NetBSD, does better sorting of Japanese searches.

Last, the japanese locale requirements have been loosened. They aren't as important as I had once thought. Though it is nice because it makes gtk antialias the japanese text on my systems.

January 19, 2008

Version 0.13.2 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

This is a another bugfix release. It looks like I didn't fix the startup problem some users experienced last time. This time I managed to get some help testing and the problem should actually be gone. I'm finally starting to understand how the setlocale command works, which helps a lot.

The dictionary terminology gossary has been separated out from the general help section. It was just different enough not to fit in. It now has it's own menuitem in the Help menu.

That's about it.

January 17, 2008

Version 0.13.1 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

This is a release focusing on fixing bugs. The most noteworthy of which was an infinitely loop on startup that some computer encountered. (It it still is not fixed, someone please email me.)

There was a crasher when attempting to print only one highlighted line in the results. The back and forward buttons have been coded better against race conditions on slow hardware because the back/forward button's wouldn't become insensitive quick enough to stop repeted executions. The highlight colors have been chosen to work better with dark themes than they were. Fixed a crasher when users would go back/forward after switching dictionaries.

There have been a few minor features added as well. alt-left and alt-right will go back and forward in the search history much like a web browser. Shift-tab will cycle backwards through the dictionaries. The colors for highlighting have been switched around and varied more. The previous red just wasn't really compatible with any of the other colors I tried with it. It is now possible to optionally compile the program without libsexy.

January 13, 2008

Version 0.13.0 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

What's changed? There is a new libsexy dependency for gWaei. It allows spell checking in the search entry which can be very handy sometimes.

The Preferences dialog has been switched around. There is no longer a separate Places install as it is actually a subset of Names. The new gWaei code downloads just the Names dictionary and splits the Places dictionary out of it manually. This has some nice side effects in that the Names dictionary becames smaller and faster, and less bandwidth is used when downloading files. Plus, rsync will now keep the Places dictionary up to date, unlike before.

The documentation for gWaei has had a large overhaul. The help manual is a bit more complete, and the README gives better directions.

The grey highlighting was a BAD idea in 0.12.0. Talk about giving migranes. I disabled it, but he code is still there just in case.

January 9, 2008

Version 0.12.0 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

The most important changes this time are portability fixes. Testing has gone into making sure that NetBSD and Fedora works. Particularly testing with NetBSD exposed some deficiencies in the code. Even though libgnomeui was dropped as a dependancy, I forgot to remove it from configure.ac, meaning the program was still compiling against it. This apparently broke localizations on BSD based Oses.

As requested by Jim Breen, there is rsync functionality for updating most of the installed dictionaries. This is much easier on their servers than reinstalling the dictionary completely.

In localization land, my good friend Fabrizio Sabatini contributed the Italian localization of gWaei. (Thanks Fabrizio!) I have also translated the rest of the Settings dialog into Japanese. It's my first attempt, so it may not be perfect. It is a good start though.

January 3, 2008

Version 0.11.0 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

It was a month in coming, but I had to enjoy my Christmas vacation a bit ;-). Happy new years peoples! Some of the nice changes of this release are some memory leak fixes, an improved "No results found" screen, and automatic searching for hiragana/katakana versions of results when possible.

Other things are improvements in the rpm and deb generation. Doing a distcheck on the tarball no longer requires root privelages. In general, the install process was made more portable.

December 5, 2008

Version 0.10.0 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

This release has a number of bug fixes and a majorly tweaked installation system. The Japanese translation has been update again. The results text has been reformatted again too. Previously, there was 2 pixels of padding above and below each line that made it difficult to visually group results. Results are now throttled to not go about ~150. There is now a "Show less relevant results" menuitem in the view menu. Last, the "No Results Found" page has been updated to be more interesting.

December 1, 2008

Version 0.9.1 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

I know I know. I released 0.9.0 just a few days ago. I had some stuff I wanted to add though and there was an important bugfix included.

gWaei no longer has a dependancy on the obsolute libgnomeui! A bug where I dereferenced gconf too many times has also been fixed. The worst problem the bug caused was the toolbar toggle and font size changing would cease to work

In other news, I finally fully translated the main window and the kanjipad window in Japanese. I avoid doing translations for things I have strong feeling I won't be able to do adequately enough, which is why it took so long. The interface has a nice consistant feeling in Japanese which I really like now.

In an attempt to introduce regular expressions to users in a non-scary way, new buttons have been appearing in the interface. The would be the Boundary, Not-Boundary, and Unkown buttons. With 0.9.1, And and Or also make an appearance. None of them are all that complicated, but they add a nice crutch.

Last, I re-added the category header for the less relevant results. It has been done better this time, so it should stay around. I am still hoping to improvie it's appearance though.

November 29, 2008

Version 0.9.0 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

This release has some major bug fixes and and new features. Finally, the program should work on locales that are not ja_jp.utf8...which means a majority of users probably had a problem. (Sorry guys! My bad!)

Other changes include Kanjipad integration. It is no longer a separate dependency. The integration brings handiness because it will past your drawn letters directly to the search input box.

Another large change is that the install source of dictionaries is changable. This means that you don't need an internet connection do do installation if you're prepared.

There have been a fair number of other fixes too. gWaei now coerces metacity to remember the window position and size settings a bit stronger.

Read my blog to find out more about the work that went into this release (with pictures!)

November 25, 2008

Version 0.8.2 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

This is a major bug fix release. I did some testing using Ubuntu and found some really really bad bugs that made the program uninstallable. Even if the user somehow managed to force the installation, gWaei would still crash during searches and freeze the GUI during dictionary installs among other problems. I want to thank Fabrizio for the heads up and getting me to fix them. Because I'm a Gentoo users, in many ways I had my head in the sand. :-)

November 23, 2008

Version 0.8 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

Getting the program code to work with Automake was a huge pain in the butt, but it's finally done. This is a released that had a lot of code reorganization.

There have been a number of bug fixes. There used to be a crash when doing a search after pressing the back button. After opening Kanjipad, a number of buttons would also stop functioning. There are fixed now.

I made a few mistakes on the interface I backtracked on from the last release. The toolbar is now hidden by default. When it is shown, the interface gets cluttered and starts to look a bit too much like a web browser. With history search items now appearing in the history menu, nothing has really been lost when with this change of defaults. I also removed the "Most Relevant results" and "Other results" headers from the results pane. The results are still organized in that fashion, but they are now easier to read without the blaring red text.

Tell me if you have any problems with this version through my email or my blog.

November 18, 2008

Version 0.7 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

This release has a lot of polish applied. Things like a new icon go a long way. On the technical side, searches now finish about twice as fast! Also, help documentation has been moved to the standard Gnome help window. Tell me if you have any problem through my email or my blog.

November 15, 2008

Version 0.6.1 of gWaei is out, go get it!

I fixed a small crasher with the radical search tool. Also, this is the first version to be released with both rpm and deb versions. Tell me if you have any problem through my email or my blog.

November 14, 2008

I'm releasing a new version of gWaei (0.6)! This version is actually fit for public consumption. The print button now works (for at least a page anyway.) I fleshed out the make file so it has the standard install, remove, and clean options. Speaking of which, the install option does a real install. The program is even added to the applications menu like it should. Last big change is that the work needed for enabling localization has been done. There is even a half done Japanese localitation already included.

Download and Install

gWaei's dependencies are:

gtk+-2.0
gconf-2.0
libcurl
libsexy

Gnome installations should automatcially fullfill all of these dependencies. Since I develop program on a Gentoo box, it is difficult for me to really test the rpms and debs I create. If you have a problem and/or have a fix, please email me. For up to date requirements and directions, read the README file included with the source tar file.

The gWaei download is available from the Sourceforge download page.