Tvangeste wrote:Heheh, Babylon is not even close! It looks ugly, the lookup times are very slow, even on very small amount of dictionaries, it also performs a lot of online searches which slows down the lookup further. I have no idea how they managed to sell any reasonable amount of copies of this stuff when alternatives such as GoldenDict are clearly superior and are free.
I tried practically everything that is available in the market, and so far the only other free app (besides GoldenDict, naturally) that impressed me was Lingoes. The guy who wrote it clearly knows its stuff and is pretty good at it. But besides the technical excellence, Lingoes has a fatal flaw, its ecosystem is more or less closed, there is no way to create and to add new dictionaries, it only supports its own (closed) format. And it seems that Lingoes is not in active development anymore.
No, not even close. In my opinion, the reason for its popularity is that it was one of the first program of its kind and is more than 15-year old! Add to that that is was advertised well (something that has to improve in GoldenDict). It hasn't added any interesting feature in a looooong time, though.
Anyhow, there are some great features on it:
* currency, time and measure conversion tools.
* OCR support.
* activate Babylon window with keyboard AND mouse.
* one click to download free content from inside the program.
Lingoes has also some interesting features but I see it more as a Babylon clone with less content available and closed source too.
Overall the best option in my opinion is GoldenDict by far:
* Cross-platform.
* Multiple formats support.
* Online dictionaries (Although this need to be improved).
* Ton of features.
* Customizable look&feel with CSS styles.\
* Great performance with hundred of dictionaries.
* Open Source.
* Actively developed.