The DAWGShow application
Icon by Ariela

DAWGShow is a PalmOS application for browsing, searching and managing Crosswords dictionary files

Download as a zip file or as a prc file.

A rudimentary description of features follows.

Features and Capabilities

• Scrolling is via hardware buttons, tapping the top/bottom half of screen, or via the arrow buttons at the top. The broken arrows (and other methods) go a full page at a time. The solid arrows go a word at a time.
• Searching
  • Is case sensitive
  • Only finds from beginning of a word: "INISH" won't find "FINISH".
  • Finds partial words, e.g. if you search for "FINISHA" with this dictionary you'll get "FINISH" at the top.
  • Accomplished by entering text and tapping GO
  • Did I mention it's case sensitive?
  • No concept of "find next" -- all searches are from the beginning of the file.
• "A" button: toggles between the standard and large fonts.
• "Cols" button: toggles display between 1, 2 and 3 columns.
• Dictionary selector:
  • Reached via Dictionaries menu item
  • Brings up a dialog showing all Crosswords dictionary files on the Palm, both in main memory and on mounted removable memory cards.
  • Use it to open a new dictionary for browsing or to delete one you no longer need.
  • Dictionaries on a card will usually have names that end in .pdb. If dictionaries with the same name (excluding the .pdb extension) exist both in the Palm's main memory and on a card, the first will hide the second.
• Top and Bottom menu items take you to the beginning and end of the file.

Possible future improvements

My goal has been to keep DAWGShow as small as possible, but some of the feature requests I'm getting make sense. Here are some that I'm considering.

• Anagram searches (requires Find Next)
• Embedded substring searches (requires Find Next)
• Wildcard searches (requires Find Next)
• Sublaunch from Crosswords

Making use of DAWGs

If a bunch of us start asking users to have lots of different 200K dictionaries on their Palms we'll make few friends. If you're interested in using the DAWG format and Crosswords dictionary files for an application you're developing I'm happy to share the source for DAWGShow and my compression code under GPL. Mail me