2005/10/02
On Friday 16 September 2005 the 'Indisch Lexicon' was presented in the auditorium of the National Library in The Hague. It is a collection of words related to the Nederlands Indisch period, together with definitions from major Dutch reference works and quotations from several sources of Dutch literature. Published in a dead-tree version, it also comes with an included CDROM, and that is where I come in. We made the CDROM application that accompanies the book, and it gives me pleasure to say that I am very proud of it. It is visually pleasing, and very simple to use. At face value it seems almost too simple, and that was the whole point.
The target market for the book is generally the older folk, as they still have some memories of that time through various involvements. So one of the key design features was to keep the UI as simple as possible. There are however some very nifty features in the app, like seeing words for certain languages, from certain reference works or selecting words based on 'themes'. I am happy to say that all these possibilities work consistently, and IMHO very well.
Another feature that I am pleased with is the automatic linking of words in the quotations, if those words also exist in the Lexicon as an entry. This was not done by the authors manually using markup, so there was some fiddling required on the database creation side. There are some false hits, but the usability increase is a small price to pay for the few weird hits.
The application runs on Windows and Mac OS X, and uses the exact same code. It basically runs as a webapp-on-the-desktop, using a built-in webserver and builtin webbrowser as a component on the two platforms. The platform-specific code is minuscule, and the UI is exactly the same. There is a tiny bit of AJAX thrown in for the incremental searches and filtering. Altogether a satisfying project from a technical point of view. If only the same could be said for certain other aspects.
UPDATE: I have been given some feedback from the one of the editors of the book. All the users of the CDROM that he has spoken have been very enthusiastic about the CDROM, and the little surprises they find. They keep on playing with it, and keep on finding new words. This news made my day. That was my goal in making it, to make it fun for people to use, and not just another boring reference work. Fantastic!
Bedankt voor de melding, Peter.
