It looks like Apple approved some iPhone application dictionary called DianHua which is very similar in concept to my app 小词典. DianHua somehow got the magical mystery combination right and got approved though, unlike 小词典 - and DianHua is free. So no one is ever going to buy 小词典 if they ever see fit to let it grace the app store.

I am beginning to understand why people dislike partnering with Apple. Thanks a lot guys.

On a lighter note, I wrote an extension to the desktop dictionary that lets you do control+command+d over any Chinese character in a cocoa application and get the pinyin and definition. Had I seen above slap in the face earlier I wouldn’t have done it mind you.

Here is a movie showing it off. If you want to beta test it let me know and I’ll send you a copy. It’s Leopard only.

My wife and I are moving to Australia! We’ve hooked up with the mighty Daemon, and are going to be doing our part to make the FarCry 5.0 Application Framework a household name. Well, at least a back-room-server, IT-hold name anyway.

We’ve been trying to learn strine, and I’ve been trying find some time to learn about footy (if you have any good references, please share). I’ve also been practicing driving on the other side of the road - the police don’t seem to like that much. I think we might hold off on getting a car.

As you might imagine we’ve been busy taking care of all the crazy things one has to do when moving to another country (on top of finishing out or current gigs). If we’ve been a little slow on getting back to you / doing releases / writing letters, that’s why.

Geoff Bowers, Daemon’s Captain, has been an amazingly cool cat. I am humbled that he would go through so much paperwork to hire a couple yanks. Just so it’s on record, we owe him a yardie - or three. On top of Daemon, Geoff also does WebDU, so hopefully I’ll get to go to that next year. WebDU is awesome.

This will be the first time either of us have worked outside of the United States, and we are very excited to give it a go. My wife and I know there will be culture shock, but from what we’ve read, Oz should be a nice fit for us. Hopefully we’ll blend right in.

FarCry is written in ColdFusion, so I’ll be dusting off my cfskills. I’ve been checking out the FarCry codebase on and off in the evening for the past few weeks, and I am excited to be digging into it soon (it’s open source so you can too). I haven’t been able to get my hands dirty yet because of all the goings on, but I have been lurching on the FarCry Google groups list (developer version), and the FarCry community seem like a nice bunch.

Sydney also has a decent sized Chinese population, and a China town so I’ll hopefully get a lot of practice with my Chinese study. We might even be able to take a vacation to China someday since it’s only a 5 hour flight. Wicked.

We are totally rapt.