Comment by Lammy

4 years ago

Does Vedaist for mobile support fully offline usage? I really really dislike being spied on every time I use a dictionary that's hooked up to some API. I bought Dictionary-dot-com Pro a few years ago because it was the only such app I could find for iOS, but then they removed the offline functionality I paid for in a 2.0 release anyway :/

9 comments

Lammy

Reply
fold3  4 years ago

On android, you have Livio which is offline, tracker free and free of charge as well.

That's pretty disappointing that MacOS has an unmatched dictionnary app but iOS is forgotten while there is decent options on Android.

  • reaperducer  4 years ago

    Not a standalone app, but on iOS you can highlight any word and select "Look up..." to get a definition. I use it frequently while reading the New York Times.

    I believe it works offline, too, since the device I use for the Times is almost never hooked up to the internet.

rrevo  4 years ago

Nope, sorry. Vedaist has online features like sync and the word catalog of almost a million words would be too large for fully offline usage. But I've also implemented product analytics which you (and many others) dislike.

I'd recommend wiktionary.org. Although it is an online dictionary it's part of the Wikipedia family and hence are better compared to other companies with regards to privacy.

  • NateEag  4 years ago

    A million words shouldn't take tons of storage, right? How big is your database?

    I spend around 500 megabytes on offline maps for OsmAnd and don't really worry about it. I would have naively guessed a million word definitions wouldn't be larger than that.

    Why do you say it's too large for fully offline usage?

    • rrevo  4 years ago

      Wiktionary dumps are around 1gb for a million words and definitions (https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiktionary/) uncompressed. However this is just raw text.

      We have images as well like https://www.vedaist.com/en/w/clarsach.html. Audio pronunciations in wiktionary are sound files. Binary resources take a lot more space.

      For mobile apps, if the size increases a lot then the first download experience is not great. After a certain size the app is not usable for low end smartphones.

      Hence I'm not sure about fully offline for a rich/modern dictionary mobile app. Downloading partial information offline like a temporary cache is possible though.

      1 reply →

    • nelgaard  4 years ago

      Ereaders have offline dictionaries. My Ereader has one based on Webster 1913. It works fine but it is of course missing words in modern books. But now you can get Wiktionary on many Ereaders which is just great.