QuickDefine

I got tired of manually looking up words in an online dictionary, so I wrote this little app to do it for me.

Built with mProjector, NeoSwiff and MTASC, this windows-only application will sit in your system tray and wait for input. Any time you need to look a word up, just click the tray icon and the lookup form will appear. Type in (or paste) the word, hit enter or click the button, and a browser window will launch you to the Encrata site with the definition of the word you were interested in.

You can find the download here: QuickDefine.zip (743 KB)

The complete source code is included, and the code is licensed under the GPL.

Originally I had wanted to write the entire application in NeoSwiff. It was incredibly easy to create the Lookup form, but I got stuck with trying to integrate the mProjector commands. I tried using the ActionScript.NativeAccess and Swiff.Internal namespaces, but to no avail. There has to be a way somehow, but I didn't want to spend too much time on such a little project.

Thus, I created an ActionScript 2 class that handles the mProjector functionality. It essentially just sets up the system tray functionality and creates a window that houses the .swf made by NeoSwiff.

Overall, this project took less than an hour, including testing. It works fine for my needs, but feel free to adapt it to your own needs. I'm sure there are things that can be added (like specifying what dictionary to use instead of Encarta), but I defintiely don't need more work to do. :-)