News
February 2019
WeSay 1.6.10 and translations
We are pleased to announce the release of WeSay 1.6.10 for Windows and Linux. All interface languages have been updated with the latest translations from Transifex, and three new interface languages a… read more
December 2017
WeSay 1.6 Release Candidate
We are pleased to announce the final release candidate of WeSay 1.6 which is 1.6.6. If no urgent problems are found in this release then it will be released as the stable version in early 2018. What&#… read more
September 2017
WeSay 1.6 Beta 1
We are pleased to announce the first beta release of WeSay 1.6 What’s New in 1.6? Version 1.6 provides a new feature to choose either Definition (default) or Gloss as the Meaning field. You can … read more
February 2015
WeSay 1.5 release version
WeSay 1.5 is now considered the official “release version.” The Windows version can be downloaded here: WeSay 1.5.39 for Windows MSI | 52.82 MB | 15 Feb 2017 and there are installation instructions fo… read more
December 2014
Announcing WeSay 1.5 Release Candidate
A release candidate of WeSay 1.5 is now available. The Windows version can be downloaded here: WeSay 1.5.37-ReleaseCandidate for Windows MSI | 53 MB | 18 Dec 2014 and there are installation instructio… read more
October 2014
WeSay 1.5 Beta for Linux and Windows
After a significant pause, a development team has been working on WeSay for Linux for the last several months. The focus has been on getting it to run on the Precise and Trusty versions of Ubuntu Linu… read more
Announcing WeSay 1.4
WeSay 1.4 has now been declared stable. Here’s what’s new in WeSay 1.4, which Windows users can download here: WeSay 1.4.55 for Windows MSI | 21 MB | 22 Oct 2014 Gather by SIL CAWL in Indonesian The g… read more
November 2012
WeSay on Linux
WeSay is available for older versions of the Linux Ubuntu distribution, Lucid being the most recent. There are two releases available, wesay-stable and wesay. The wesay release is our development rele… read more
Announcing WeSay 1.3
Here’s what’s new in WeSay 1.3, which Windows users can download here: WeSay 1.3.78 for Windows MSI | 21 MB | 17 May 2013 Display glosses in Gather by Semantic Domain Task If you configure this task s… read more
June 2012
New WeSay Screencasts
David Rowbory in Nigeria has contributed five screen-casts he made to help people he has taught to use WeSay. Thanks David! Do you have videos or other materials you could share with the rest of us?… read more
April 2012
Announcing WeSay 1.2
Here’s what’s new in WeSay 1.2, which Windows users can download here: WeSay 1.2.12 for Windows MSI | 21 MB | 07 Oct 2016 Improved FLEx Collaboration We have made various changes to smooth the process… read more
June 2010
Using the Internet to Collaborate on a Dictionary
WeSay is the best tool for collaborating with others on collecting and describing words, whether you are in the same village or across the world or both. Here’s a guide to setting up collaboration usi… read more
Using Collaboration Notes
Collaboration is more than just sharing changes. It turns out that as soon as you start working with others using Send/Receive, you find you want to write notes to them. So we added the ability to att… read more
Viewing the History of Changes
Like most things in WeSay, you, the Advisor, need to turn on the collaboration features which are appropriate for your project. There are two optional tasks you can enable if you want: These show up o… read more
WeSay Dictionary Collaboration
Since we first introduced WeSay a couple years ago, we’ve heard one request over and over: “Make it so that multiple people can collaborate on the dictionary.” We’ve now delivered on that, and you can… read more
January 2010
Merging LIFT Dictionary Files
If you aren’t yet using the new collaboration features of WeSay, you may have multiple versions of your dictionary out there. Here are a few notes on ways to get them together. The simplest case is wh… read more
June 2009
More Control Over “Missing Info” Tasks
WeSay has always had Tasks which would show you just the words that needed some more information in a particular field. However, the selection of which entries to show was pretty blunt: if the field h… read more
April 2009
Art of Reading Comes to WeSay
Illustrations always cheer up an otherwise drab dictionary. Until now, you had to put in a lot of work to find or create illustrations, get the rights to them, and hook them into your dictionary. With… read more
January 2009
Collecting Audio with WeSay
For a long time, I’ve had the crazy idea that audio should be just another kind of “writing system”. I’m happy to say that now, crazy or not, you can set up a project to like this: Notice the circles … read more
Single-Click Printing
In my last post, I mentioned that three levels of printing WeSay dictionaries are taking shape: Useful for everyday WeSay users, with no training. Good enough for final publication of many projects, w… read more
Open In Lexique Pro
WeSay really wants to focus on gathering data. It really doesn’t want to become a full-powered dictionary layout system. Ideally, there would be an invisible, friction-free means of getting a simple d… read more
Which WeSay?
Our approach to software development requires that we “ship early, ship often”. We listen carefully to you, and try to quickly respond to your requests (though at this point, we’re way behind on many … read more
New Dashboard
It’s been a wild year for our team, and if all you do is follow this blog, you’d think we disappeared. Eric has moved to Microsoft (lucky them!), I’ve moved from Thailand to the USA and then Papua New… read more
August 2008
WeSay on the Eee 900
The Eee is, so far, the best selling of the new wave of 4P computers; laptops which are characterized by low Price, adequate Performance, Portability, and low electrical Power requirements. Now, this … read more
January 2008
Using WeSay from Other Applications
Recently, we were asked to make a way for a user of a translation program to make use of WeSay, without leaving the program they’ve been trained on. The native speaker-user will want to: See which wor… read more
November 2007
Add Semantic Domains using WeSay
WeSay now lets the user edit the semantic domains of a sense from the Dictionary Browse and Edit tab, as an alternative to gathering words using the Gather by Semantic Domain task. To see how this wor… read more
Simple and Advanced Sorting
One of the last big features for version 1 of WeSay has been in a for while. Someone (I won’t mention any names) did a great job on it but didn’t blog about it. So I’ll see if I can do it justice. In … read more
September 2007
Configuration Tool Remodel
One of the benefits of being stuck at home recovering from Dengue Fever is I feel like it’s ok to splurge a bit on stuff that I want to do, rather than have to do. For example, while we have always pu… read more
Pictures in Dictionary Entries
I’ve been working on simple support for pictures in WeSay: When you choose a picture, it is copied to the pictures sub-folder of the WeSay folder. So everything stays together. Some more things to do … read more
August 2007
Updated Roadmap
We’ve updated the WeSay Roadmap, here. Primarily, we’re aiming to finish up Relations (which support sub-entries), Sorting, and Internationalization. We hope the sorting is simple for the 80% of folks… read more
June 2007
Email My Work
It’s really satisfying to arrive at a stage where we can put some of the icing on the WeSay cake. Our next build will include a feature we’ve talked about from day one. This lets a user send his proje… read more
May 2007
WeSay Action Addins
Starting with this next release, you or a friendly programmer can create an small .Net dll, add it to the WeSay program directory, and then immediately use it within WeSay and the WeSay Configuration … read more
Oh, the pain…
…of having to listen to your own recorded voice for hours on end. That’s what I’m going through for you, folks, as I put together a series of instructional videos for this Preview version of WeSay. He… read more
April 2007
WeSay Roadmap
We’re just shy of our first “alpha” (which we’re going to call a “preview”). This means we have to catch up on doing some of those non-coding things like documentation, release notes, etc. Here’s a pr… read more
Our First OLPC
Though it was stranded by our university closing down for Thai New Year, Alan delivered our OLPC test machine yesterday. It may look like a toy, but it feels very substantial. Heavy, even. I think Kin… read more
Collect Words by Semantic Domains
It’s been awhile since we’ve posted but that does not mean we haven’t been active. I’ve added a new task to collect words by semantic domains. There is substantial evidence that we organize words in o… read more
February 2007
A Better, Faster Find
A couple weeks ago, a potential user approached us wanting to use WeSay to keep a simple dictionary of words he had encountered while language learning. Right away, he wrote back and said he needed th… read more
January 2007
Multilingual Option Lists
Any dictionary program needs to help the user be consistent when entering field that have a closed set of values, e.g. parts of speech. FLEx calls these Possibility Lists, Toolbox has Range Sets. WeSa… read more
Multiscribe
One of the goals of WeSay is to support user interfaces in languages with scripts that require complex shaping. Microsoft Windows has the ability to render complex scripts using their shaping engine c… read more
December 2006
Using Python To Read a FieldWorks Lexicon
Well, it’s Christmas break for me, which usually means my head gets hungry to learn something new. Alas, that hasn’t happened yet, but I did try something new. I got into Python for .Net and used it t… read more
November 2006
Networked WeSay?
I got some more great questions this morning: “Couldn’t we just put a WeSay front-end onto FLEx (FieldWorks Language Explorer)? It uses the same underlying stuff, doesn’t it?” Nothing is currently sha… read more
WeSay for the Mac?
We’ve received the second request for a Mac version: How hard would it be to compile on the Mac? Seems like it couldn’t be that hard, could it, since your aim is cross-platform? At the worst, it could… read more
A Little UML
WeSay has never claimed (or intended) to do “Extreme Programming“. While we are into the goals of Agile processes, we know that one size doesn’t fit all. For example, we are doing a fair bit of Test-D… read more
Orthography Development with WeSay
John Duerksen, who is working with a cluster of Bantu languages, gave us a load of ideas for how WeSay might fit into their process. I have to write up my notes anyhow, so I’ll do it here in case it s… read more
CTC 2006 Presentation
Whew. I’m getting too old for international conferences, or at least ones that entail a full week and a 12 hour time shift. I just returned yesterday from North Carolina, and of course my head is brim… read more
October 2006
New Screenshots
We’ve been pumping out a bunch of new features in the last few weeks… it’s been great to have a long run without technical snags, for a change. Some new features include: Multiple scripts per field Ad… read more
Introducing the Dashboard
Since it’s been awhile since we’ve blogged, I figured I’d give a little status report. We just finished getting the dashboard task to be functional. The dashboard displays the current task as well as … read more
September 2006
Localization
I am dictating this blog using Microsoft Vista’s built in speech recognition. I have been using speech recognition for over five years now, and I’m very excited about the quality I’m seeing. Back to W… read more
Still Alive
No, we haven’t expired, just gotten lazy about blogging. Maybe it would help if we ever got comments (hint hint). Anyways, here is a five-minute blog just to list some of what we should have been blog… read more
August 2006
This Isn’t Prototype Anymore
Thanks to Cathy, we now have a revamped skin on our wiki. We also have acquired so update your bookmarks. I have been working on two areas of WeSay. The first is our data access layer. Db4o provides a… read more
Sam the Helper Hero (Programmer Personas)
This past week, Eric and I have been designing and starting to implement the code framework for WeSay. I have rarely had a chance to do this kind of “green fields” architecture before, but I have done… read more
So Long Prototype
Today we broke ground on “the real thing”. All of the prototype code has been put away (still in the code repository, of course) and we are starting from scratch. The prototype has served us well, hel… read more
New Mockups
I’ve updated our mockups here, based on the work that Berm, Eric and I did last week. They are not 100% faithful to what we are actually planning, especially on the OLPC version (where we won’t be spe… read more
July 2006
In Search of “Hairy Basil”
Wednesday we said goodbye to the last of our guests who flew over to discuss collaborating on applications for language development on low-power computers. Everyone seems to have had a good time, or a… read more
Against a Brick Wall
After two discouraging days of trying to get Mono to work on the OLPC image, I have finally figured out why I was up against such a brick wall. The first problem I had was that the Mono installer for … read more
Configuration Mockups
Besides buying paint for the office (which we fear may now end up looking like a coffee house), I drew up some mockups of a configuration application, here.… read more
Dabbling in Spring.Net
Today’s main task was to get FieldWorks Language Explorer to build on my machine, so that I can work on adding the ability for users to import and export the forth-coming xml dictionary interchange fo… read more
June 2006
It’s Pretty Fast, Too
One of the things that’s been bugging us for the past couple weeks has been performance. Sure it’s fast on our machines but what about our target machine. There is quite a difference there. So I was f… read more
WeSay: Words Prototype Results, Part I
These have been an exciting last few days, as our prototype has got to the place where we can start getting some questions answered. Happily, our quick tests (just looking at the Windows Task Manager)… read more
Lazy NodeStore
Our prototype is finally starting to shape up. I spent the past few days figuring out how to do lazy loading into a GTK TreeView. Normally, you would pass all the data to the TreeStore which would the… read more
Towards a Prototype
As we have written before, we are beginning our project by checking out the technical feasibility of running a graphical, mono based dictionary application on the most demanding of a target platforms,… read more
31 Flavors, 400 Volts, and 1 Million of Anything
This afternoon, Eric and I first went shopping for office plants, then did a Thai language study session in the nearby ice cream shop. Doesn’t sound like we were working very hard, does it? Here’s our… read more
Light at the End of this Tunnel
We started out the day today with our goal of getting our test app running on mono on OLPC. Mono doesn’t come with the OLPC distribution so we will need to add it. This led us to try to download the O… read more
The Slog Continues
Normally, software development really is fun. So much so, we sometimes neglect the parts that aren’t fun. Recognizing this, we decided upfront to tackle the high risk and no fun parts of this project,… read more
New Wiki and Blog
This morning we decided to not continue the fight with our confluence installation and have instead switched to use WordPress for our blog and MediaWiki for our wiki. John is switching our content ove… read more
Shiny New Logo
Reading over our first two blog entries, I realize that we haven’t explained our work context here. While we are getting help from people in both Calgary and California, Eric and I are co-located in C… read more
Web Site Up (sorta)
WeSayHome.org is almost usable. Special thanks to Visa and Eric. We’ll be using JIRA for issue tracking (requests, bugs, tasks, etc.). Today Eric got MySQL running as the back-end for Confluence and J… read more
May 2006
Office Almost Ready
Eric, Alan, and I spent the morning at our new office, which is almost ready to move into. In this picture, the guys are putting some “frosting” across our front wall so that we have a lit… read more
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