One of the most under­rated app, built in every Mac OS X is Apple’s own Dictionary. It is by far the most inte­grated, small and pow­er­ful app money can’t buy, a cloud of wis­dom, an extendible eco-system of its own.

Little known that one can sim­ply press a key combo to search for def­i­n­i­tions even with­out launch­ing the app, tiger/leopard users can just spot­light any word and get the mean­ings in sec­onds, fire up dash­board and the dic­tio­nary wid­get will be at your ser­vice, type & bingo!

But there’s a prob­lem; Basically only English-Japanese is avail­able out of the box.

Worry not, as you can down­load addi­tional dic­tio­nar­ies from apple.com to extend your dic­tio­nary app. Furthermore, there’s a free­ware app called DictUnifier, that con­verts & installs dic­tio­nary data files.

There’s a group of nice guys who main­tains these dic­tio­nar­ies, they form their own data­base stan­dard where many of the dic­tio­nar­ies can be down­loaded for free. We can then use DictUnifier con­vert & auto­mat­i­cally install—as an addon—any start­dict stan­dard dic­tio­arny files, as a result, you can have a smarter & com­pre­hen­sive def­i­n­i­tion with­out even spend­ing a dime, just a lit­tle time of yours.

Links: Apple.com (search for ‘dictionary’)

Dictionaries: stardict.org DictUnifier Dictionary for Bahasa Indonesia

More exten­sive tuto­r­ial: David Tse’s Blog

(from the archive ://World Wide Will)