Aiksaurus

A cross-platform, open-source thesaurus

Introduction

Aiksaurus is a set of libraries and applications which provide a thesaurus (currently English only, based on Guttenburg's Moby thesaurus) using native GUI on several platforms: UNIX (GTK+ & Qt), Win32 & MacOSX (Cocoa). The core library itself is platform-independent. The principal language is C++, with some use of Cocoa/ObjC++; wrappers are provided for C and Cocoa/ObjC.

Aiksausus plugins exist for AbiWord on UNIX and Win32; the library is also used by Lyx; and the new Cocoa port provides a MacOSX NSService hook so that Safari and other such applications can use this thesaurus without Aiksaurus-specific development.

News

29th May, 2003

Version 1.0.0 released officially. In addition to the new Cocoa port, the gtk front end has been upgraded by dom and rms to use gtk+ >= 2.0, and dom will probably do even more work on that before the next release. I've rewritten the build system, and rms and mg have created a new RPM spec. (I haven't yet looked at the kde/qt/php/irc parts of Aiksaurus.) Finally: the AiksaurusGTK application has been renamed gaiksaurus.

27th May, 2003

I've released Version 1.0.0 of the Cocoa port (screenshot below). Documentation is still on the TODO list, however.

14th May, 2003

The nice people at SourceForge have granted my request for co-adminship of the Aiksaurus project. I've also added Dom Lachowicz as an admin because, well, if you have a problem and no one else can help you, maybe you can ask the Abi-Team (or its admin, anyway).

Ports

GTK+

The original front-end by Jared has been updated (in CVS) by Dom and Rui Miguel Seabra to GTK+-2.x. Still has a couple of bugs in need of ironing out.

QT

By Jared and gallium. I don't know the status of this, but if I ever get YDL working I'll take a look.

Win32

By Mike Pritchett. A preliminary version of this can be downloaded as a binary.

MacOSX

By myself (fjf). There is a build of Aiksaurus 0.11 available and CVS Aiksaurus can be built using Project Builder. A preliminary version of this is available for download.

Java

The core library only, ported by Rich Robinson. Source & binary downloads available.

Screen shots

Here's a screen shot of the new Cocoa port of Aiksaurus. The standalone application is shown top-left, and the utility panel (part of Aiksaurus.framework) is shown bottom-left. The CD playing is Dixie Chicks' Home.