DICToMatic is a small utility that consists mainly of a global floating window. When the user
clicks in the window a popup menu is displayed containing all the words on the clipboard. Once a word is selected DICToMatic then logs onto an internet dictionary and quickly recieves one or many definitions. It is currently implemented using the Dict Protocol (RFC 2229) to access online dictionary resources.
Future areas of development
More options for default action, ie. match exact or in part
Better parsing of Clipboard, ie. quoted strings
Nice animations while connecting, and looking up words
application monitoring ie no use of clipboard
Win32 system Tray
Bugs and Issues
MacOS - doesn't update menu until application gets focus
MacOS - seems to freeze a little during initial communication with the server
MacOS - Unable to activate the application via the global window
Current Status
DICToMatic has been tidied up and pretty well tested now. There are still a few issues with MacOS, but they are mostly unimportant as the whole global window thing is kind of redundant on the Mac as it hides running apps neatly away.
The display window is customizable and uses hyplerlink style cross referencing. I've also finished the documentation which is included in the download. The current version is 1.220902.27. Clipboard parsing has been greatly improved but is by no means perfect. I'd Really like to put it in the system tray on Windows, and do direct application monitoring, but this requires a lot more work (and very OS specific code) and is more than I can really afford in time to implement. But you never know.
