How Zydeo came to be
Who needs another Chinese dictionary, and a desktop tool at that? Or: Zydeo 1.0’s release notes.
Zydeo started as a hobby project in the summer of 2014. For several months I didn’t truly believe it would grow beyond a harmless outlet for my urge to fiddle with things, experiment with user interfaces, and code just for the fun of it. But soon enough this creature took on a life of its own, and I realized it was becoming precisely the dictionary I wanted to use in my own (often abortive) effort to learn Mandarin.
A big part of the inspiration came from Bret Victor’s 2006 article, Magic Ink, which resonated with my own thinking about user interfaces. A dictionary is pure information software, where the best kind of interaction is no interaction at all. I suddenly understood why I found many of the existing online and desktop dictionaries so cumbersome. When I’m deciphering a Chinese text, I’m in a flow where I don’t want the dictionary to be the center of my attention; I want it to get out of the way. I don’t want to put in asterisks to fine-tune my search, and I don’t want to go through a monotonous, cluttered list to find what I’m looking for. I hope to give as little input as possible, and have the computer figure out the right answer for me.
Gradually, a coherent picture of the dream tool emerged. Because we’re dealing with an ideographic script, character recognition is a must. Until I know what a character is, I cannot type it on a computer, and looking up unknown characters is exactly what I’m doing when I’m trying to understand an unfamiliar text.
Once I draw or type my query, I want the software to figure out my question. If it’s Hanzi, it should recognize that and search for Hanzi. If it’s Pinyin, it should search in the Pinyin headwords. In all other cases, it must be English, so it should search in English equivalents or glosses.
It should not need asterisks or the like to know if I’m looking for a full word or a part of something. It should simply rank the most likely entries higher in the output. And it should lay out the results in a format where I can easily find the bits of information I’m looking for – in other words, it should rely on typography so I can skim the results quickly, and use highlights to show which part of each entry answers my question.
The moment of thrill came when I found that every single building block I needed was already out there, open-source, free to use. Jordan Kiang created a character recognition tool, HanziLookup, in 2006. It is in Java, and my platform on Windows is different, but I could port it with reasonable effort. And there is of course CC-CEDICT, an open-source, community-edited dictionary with over 110 thousand entries.
All I had to do was to bring these building blocks together and combine them in a sleek user interface. Getting there involved a lot of plain old schlep, but more importantly, it was a process of sawing off unnecessary details and reducing the tool to the essentials: eliminating any clutter and interaction that was not absolutely necessary. You can find the details of this journey documented in the blog, written up in posts that range from abstract design ideas to very specific tricks of the Windows developer’s trade.
I put about three person-months’ work into the first version of Zydeo (over a much longer period, of course), but because my job would have been completely and utterly impossible without all the open-source resources out there, I chose to open-source my own work too. In this way I hope Zydeo will be a useful tool for those who are interested in Chinese, while the source code, the data I produced as a side effect, and the blog posts may be a useful resource for developers.
Enjoy.