J2ME midlet turning your old cell phone to an English to Russian (and backwards) dictionary. It uses digits keys for predictive (T9-like) words input.

I did use MobileLexicon English to Russian dictionary on my cell phone for some time. This dictionary has horrible interface and pretty good vocabulary. You need to apply some force to obtain translations from it. This program didn’t satisfy me.

I’ve written MobileLexicon database converter to my own binary format. It stores the dictionary in the prefix tree. The midlet I’ve also written is able to read such database.

PieceOfDictionary is a combination of converter and the dictionary midlet.

Features

You’re able to

• enter English words using virtual qwerty keyboard on touchphones (should work on the hardware qwerty too),
• switch interface languages in the “Options” and turn on/off fullscreen mode with long tap,
• use predictive text input on the phones with digital keyboard,
• watch words’ history by pressing “Left” / “Right” keys or by swiping to the left/right.

Dictionaries are the best candidates to implement predictive text input by program developer. It’s strange that I didn’t see that in other programs.

Russian letters are often situated on the keys with small differences. E.g. “Fly phones“ aren’t using usual order: абвг | деёжз | ийкл | мноп | рсту | фхцч | шщъы | ьэюя, but you’re able to setup letters’ placement in the program’s preferences.

There’s no translation direction menu. You can see that various directions’ words articles were mixed with each other. There’s no need in such menu: just press right keys and you’ll see your word.

In the case when you’re entering the word using virtual keyboard translation direction menu would be definitely excess: you’ve already chosen input language.

Words articles are sorted in the following order:

1. amount of non-space chars in article’s key,
2. ISO 639-2 language tag (eng, rus)—lexicographically,
3. article’s keys—lexicographically.

PieceOfDictionary’s first launch parameters are specified in parameters.xml file. The program was intended for using any amount of dictionaries. XML files were used for interface translations too. I’ve used kXML to read XML. I had an idea of building a website allowing to add necessary dictionaries to JAR archive (and to edit parameters.xml.

MIDP 2.0 doesn’t have methods of reading UTF-8 files and maximal file size was limited in several JVMs. I’ve written a bunch of EasyReadingFile classes allowing to work with UTF-8 and to seek across the colony of files forming one large “file”.

I recommend the program to the owners of MIDP cell phones’ with digital keyboard because the dictionary has predictive text input (like T9 or iTAP) across vocabulary’s words.

Download PieceOfDictionary

PieceOfDictionary.jar 0.0.1 (1.3 MiB)

Sources (1.3 MiB)

Use, change, publish it but specify my authorship somewhere please.

The program was published on 4pda.ru initially.