hi hiranp, welcome to the site and thanks for using my little program.
WordWeb is a great piece of reference software that existed long before I started to code Mobysaurus, therefore it's not a copycat of Mobysaurus (and vice versa).
Mobysaurus bases its database on Grady Ward's publicly available copyright-free
Moby Thesaurus, and serves specifically as a thesaurus. WordWeb is both a thesaurus and dictionary powered by the
WordNet linguistic database from Princeton University.
The two programs are inevitably not connected (almost in every aspect) in terms of coding due to huge differences in database structure and general functionality.
During the development of Mobysaurus, I actually learned quite a few things from WordWeb about creating a nice and clean user interface that doesn't confuse - you don't often see programs look as neat as WordWeb.
So far there are two features in Moby and WordWeb that look similar (as I see it):
1. Global Hotkey
WordWeb is presumably the first reference tool to implement "Key1 + Key2 + Key3" (e.g. Ctrl + Alt + W) patterned hotkey support, followed by Mobysaurus and then by
TheSage. It's a very handy feature and I thought Moby users might like it too so I added it to the program.
2. Online Referencing
I shamelessly claim
to be the first one to offer this feature. The recently released WordWeb 5 also nicely supports tabbed online lookup.
Although Mobysaurus is much more powerful (brazen-faced self-praise
) as a thesaurus, it's no dictionary at all. Luckily it works with WordWeb (both free and pro versions) so there should be no problem looking up words conveniently in Mobysaurus if you also have WordWeb installed.
Copy Cat code?As for new features, what would *you* like to see in the next version of Mobysaurus?
- Anderson (the author of Mobysaurus)
