Today I had the blazingly obvious idea that kdict need not be a web app. I'm still planning to build a web-based browse interface, but it would really be easier to make the editing interfaces be interactive, stateful programs. Plus I just hate the web.
All is not wine and roses, however. There is the small problem of never having written any GTK app. Mercifully the GTK+Perl docs look to be in far better shape than the Curses ones, which seem to assume that you've been writing curses apps with C for a dozen years and just need some refreshing. Not that curses is a terribly realistic option in this case, given that text display in ASCII, Japanese, and two Chinese character sets is required.
And that has just now brought to mind a problem I hadn't yet considered: the house linux box (there's only one (okay, only one which is not an external server), with access via X terms or X11.app) doesn't have a Chinese input method installed. The easiest thing to do would be to let K run it on her OS X box -- but does PerlGTK run there? And if it does, does it know about the system-level IM/FEPs? Bleh. Maybe I should stick with the web for now anyway :-/
Finally, Ruby has been calling me for years. The last thing I need to do right now is start learning a new language, but the siren song is so, so sweet...
Re:ruby
mdxi on 2003-11-18T19:55:24
I don't really know. I broke down last night and read the first 1.5 chapters of Programming Ruby; that was my first experience with the language.
