The Omni Group — the folks who develop applications such as OmniWeb, OmniGraffle, and OmniOutliner — is now shipping OmniDictionary 2.0 and it’s free.
OmniDictionary is a Mac OS X client for network dictionary servers. It’s easy to use. Type a word into the entry field, hit return and the definition is displayed. If the dictionary server supports multiple dictionaries, you can select your desired dictionary from the dictionary popup to limit queries to that specific dictionary or you can query all the dictionaries. OmniDictionary also provides a “Define in OmniDictionary” Service, so you can select words in your other applications and hit Command+= to see the definition.
OmniDictionary provides a service to many other applications, so you can simply highlight a word in any of these apps — such as Mac OS X’s Mail or the Omni Group’s OmniWeb browser — and look it up via the Services menu. OmniDictionary can even speak the definitions to you aloud if you want. It also provides a “history ” so you can return to words you previously looked up in a current session. OmniDictionary also lets you save definitions to a file, or copy them for use in another application.
Mac OS X 10.0 only registers Services from applications installed in /Applications/Developer/Applications, or subfolders thereof, so if you want to use the Service provided by OmniDictionary you’ll need to install it in one of those locations. Services can be provided by applications installed in /Network/Applications if the NSServicesFromNetworkApplications default (in NSGlobalDomain) is set to YES.
Version 2.0 adds a “Check for Updates” item to the application menu. If you select this menu item, OmniDictionary will check to see if there’s a more recent release available. If there is, you’ll be given the option of going directly to the download page for the new release. The dictionary popup now lists the dictionaries in alphabetical order. OmniDictionary 2.0 also adds support for saving the definition to a plain text file; support for showing the DICT server information; server preferences, allowing you to set the dictionary server hostname, port, and timeout; a font preference, so you can specify what font/font size you want for the definitions; and the ability to manually disconnect from the server.
Link references are now underlined; you can just click on them to lookup the underlined word. Help and Release Notes are now available via the Help menu. The interface has also been tweaked to make it more “Aqua-fied” for Mac OS X.