Tricky Dictionary Thingy

Tricky Dictionary Thingy is an easy-to-use program that lets you write a document in Thai without knowing Thai.

It does this by providing many pre-written templates (stock or common phrases) in English with correct Thai translations. It also provides a fast and simple lookup into the Thai dictionary.

By following some simple rules, this will allow you to write a short note to your honey or secretary, write a thank you note for someone, invite people to a party, make a shopping list, and so on, with minimal or no knowledge of Thai. Because it uses templates, it's not overly useful for writing a formal document, such as a proposal, because you need some knowledge of Thai grammar, but it is useful for everyday things.

Tricky Dictionary normally sits on your desktop as an icon. You can make it any size from 16 pixels to 128 pixels. At 16 pixels, it is small enough to sit unobtrusively anywhere on your screen. It always stays on top.

If you right-click the icon, you get this sub-menu:

Here, you can select the icon size, from 16 to 128 pixels. You can see a sample of the 16 pixel icon here; it's very tiny, and unobtrusive.

You can also select the default languages, depending on what languages you have downloaded through Web Update.

If you click on the red door, or the text beside the door, Tricky Dicky terminates and the icon vanishes.

When you double-click the icon, or click on "Show Full Menu" in the sub-menu, you get the main screen, which looks like this:

The picture, by the way, is former US president Richard Nixon, who became known as "Tricky Dicky" after the Watergate Hotel scandal. If you are interested, check the Wikipedia entries: Richard Nixon and Watergate.

There are four tabs, labelled "Words Found", "History", "Classifiers", and "Templates". Here, the Templates tab is shown.

You can see that it has a list of stock English phrases; selecting one by clicking on it shows the Thai in the upper box at the left, and the English in the lower box. You can now press the copy button (to the right of the Thai flag) and copy that phrase into any open document, including Microsoft Word.

When you copy some Thai to the ClipBoard, the English is also inserted into the History list, so it will be available next time, without having to scroll through the long list of templates again.

The Filter section below the lists allows you to reduce the list shown by selecting only lines containing the filter word. For example, if the filter is "nurse", only templates containing "nurse" will be shown.
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Versions

There will be two versions of Tricky Dicky, a free version and a paid version.

The free version will have only a limited number of templates and will display a rotating advertisement at the bottom of the main window.

The paid version will be available as both a download and a CD-ROM. The CD-ROM will be priced at 800 baht in retail stores in Thailand and $39 on the Internet. The retail version will not have any advertising.
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Requirements

You MUST have Speak Easy Thai installed. Tricky Dicky uses the same database engine and dictionaries and sound files and images, but does not include them in the download. It does not matter if you have the free trial or the retail version of Speak Easy Thai, but it will work better if the full version is installed, because there will be many more sound files. Yes, Tricky Dicky will speak dictionary words; it will not, at this time, speak the templates, but a future version will.
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Download

This program is still in development but will be available shortly.

To be notified when it is available, send me an e-mail.
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How to Get Tricky Dicky for Free

You can get the retail version of Tricky Dicky for free if you do one of the following:

1. Submit a bug report. ("Doug, it fails when I ....") -- OR

2. Translate a minimum of 200 templates to your language (Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish).
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Affiliates

If you have a Thai-oriented web site or blog, you can promote Tricky Dictionary Thingy and receive a 50% commission on sales. You will need a free Clickbank account. The details will be provided when Tricky Dicky is released. Use the e-mail link above to contact me for details.