Reverse-Engineering Apple Dictionary

Reverse-Engineering Apple Dictionary

摘要

For a while now I have wanted to write a simple dictionary app for the Apple Watch. The goal was to be able to quickly look up words from paper books, by storing the book on the watch to be able to do fuzzy matches against the text. While Apple ships amazing dictionaries with macOS and iOS, they only provide a very limited API. On iOS, all you get is a view into the dictionary via UIReferenceLibraryViewController, for the Watch, there is no API at all, and on OS X you get an antique DCSCopyTextDefinition that only returns a plain-text definition, which is not nice to display. The whole definition is returned as one blob of non-rich text, no newlines.