Just made a large update to the Chinese Reader, and I'm hoping to get another one out in the next week or two, hence this thread.

The summary page is now redone, and includes things like frequency information (thanks Scott!), HSK Levels, an extract from the text, and an ability to jump to the particular word, the option to directly add items to Skritter* and known words, and some other stuff. I suppose it's now a buffed up version of the Chinese Word Extractor, but for mac.

Screenshot: http://tiny.cc/50q3iw

I've also updated the base CC-CEDICT dictionary to use pinyin tone marks (thanks Nick for the code!) rather than tone numbers. You'll have to re-add your Skritter vocab to get this, and will need your Skritter vocab to be exported with tone marks**.

Enjoy!


* Adding to Skritter, it just opens a new browser window for each word. If you're adding a lot of words, it's probably better to hit copy, then paste it into the quick-add in Skritter.

** atdlouis, I'm yet to fix that crash you mentioned, so you'll have to delete the extra tab character in the definition of 怨气 before importing.

Edit, forgot the link: http://www.byzanti.co.uk

Edit, in case anyone's already downloaded it, I've just updated it to 0.3.1 to remove a crash when copying. The crash only showed up in the release build! 气死我!

Looks awesome! I really need to get a Mac (or vmware)...

Will you make it available on Windows based PC?

This is a wonderful program. The only problem is that it crashes while adding my Skritter vocabulary.

Evan, do you have 怨气 in your Skritter vocabularly? That has an extra tab character lurking at the end of the default definition, which causes it to crash. Skritter exports in a tab delimited format, and Chinese Reader imports by splitting up by tab, so an extra tab throws it!

If removing the character at the end of 怨气's definition doesn't do the trick, or you're having problems with it, send me your Skritter export in a txt file attached to an email, and I'll send you back a working copy. There could always be other words with lurking tabs too -- all my definitions are custom, so I never have this issue!

Email: byz (-at-) byzanti (-dot-) co (-dot-) uk

Philip Prendeville, I'm afraid not, it's time consuming enough to do it for Mac!

@Byzanti - this is awesome! I just downloaded it then! You should set up a PayPal donation system so us grateful Skritters can give you small tokens of our appreciation! :-)

I just deleted the tab in 怨气. If there turn out to be more of these, I can write a script to hunt them.

Nice work on Chinese Reader!

joey, I appreciate the offer, but I'm happy enough to see people using it!

Nick - super, thanks! Was going to ask, but you guys seemed up to your knees with the various iOS apps and what not!

I love this program. Really, really useful for reading texts and studying with Skritter.

One tiny request: can you have the 'add to skritter' link go to skritter.cn/blahblah (or provide the option for it to do so)?

Drone - sure. I'll add it in the next version.

Byzanti, is it possible to add a feature to delete your vocab in the Chinese Reader?
I'd like to keep an old build on my laptop to scan texts for frequently used words, no matter if I know them or not. It would be a great way to make glossary lists for my class mates.
Thanks a lot for your work on this app. It's impressive.

Not as a feature, but if you want to delete all the data in the app (Skritter words, other words you've added etc), you can go to Users/YourName/Library/Application Support/Chinese Reader and delete that folder.

If you want to keep the texts you've saved, delete everything apart from the savedIndex.plist and the /saved directory.

However, that doesn't quite do what you want, as you'll either be forced to use the app with vocab, or use the app without vocab. The two can't coexist at the same time, unless you have two user accounts.

I think it's worth adding as a feature though, but I'm afraid you'll have to wait a while. Have very little free time atm! I've made a note to add it at somepoint, though.

No worries, I think I'll just delete them temporarily, and then reimport afterwards. Thanks for the explanation!

This is absolutely fantastic.

At last it seems worth having a Mac! (actually for Pleco too)

Probably easier to add from the summary window - every time I click on a word to add to Skritter, the browser pops up and fills the screen. But I must admit I haven't tried it for long.

You might have an amazon wishlist, might you?

Zeppa - sorry about that, but it's really the simplest way to add to Skritter!

If you have lots of words you want to add from a text, I think the best way is to select as many as you want from the summary screen (hold down cmd to select multiple), and then click copy. You can then paste the lot into Skritter's quick add (press shift-A anywhere on the website).

Thanks for the kind words :)