Getting right information with iFinger

Zatni Arbi, Columnist, zatni@cbn.net.id

"Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee. And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me."

I remember having read that line more than 20 years ago. I was reminded of it again when I was playing around with iFinger's Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Actually, I was looking for my favorite verse from the same American poet, Robert Frost. I was sure I would find it, as it is quite a famous one. And, yes, there it was in the program's article page: "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I/I took the one less traveled by. And that has made all the difference."

We all know that one actually has to read extensively in order to be able to impress others with his rich choice of words as he speaks or writes. I am not that fortunate, though, as my ability to read books is very limited due to my poor vision.

To compensate for this, I know I have to rely on technology. That is the reason I have always been on the lookout for software that will help me find synonyms or more accurate expressions. Today, besides the Internet, which is an incredible depository of words and expressions, we also have an increasing number of reference materials that can be installed right on our computer.

Some time ago we took a brief look at a suite of reference materials provided by Penguin Hutchinson, which includes a Roget's Thesaurus, a Longman Dictionary, a Hutchinson Chronology of World History and a Penguin Dictionary of Quotations. This time, we have a look at another set of reference tools based on the works published by Oxford University Press.

If you go to the website of iFinger (www.ifinger.com), you will be able to download the 30-day trial version of a number of reference materials, including monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, such the UK as well as U.S. versions of the Bloomsbury Business Dictionary, the Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and the Fifth Edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Their prices vary, and the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations costs 40 euros. This one immediately grabbed my attention.

This dictionary contains 20,000 quotations, many taken from the works of poets and writers such as Robert Frost, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Alan Poe and Shakespeare, of course. It also includes quotations from monumental works such as Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species and Plato's The Republic.

You can also find enlightening quotations from politicians, too, undoubtedly. Remember Margaret Thatcher's comment, "In politics, if you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman."

It took me some time to understand how this dictionary worked. The search input field can be docked on the title bar of any Windows application, or it can be dragged down to float on the screen. You can also set it to search for entries based on a word inside an opened Word document just by double-clicking on it. So, for example, to find all the selected quotations from speeches or comments made by the Iron Lady -- and I have already typed her name in my document, all I have to do is double-click on it.

Inside the Internet Explorer, the search is very easy. When you place the mouse cursor over a name or a word on the page, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations will automatically search for the entries containing that word or name. Unfortunately, this does not work inside Microsoft Word or any other applications.

To deactivate the application, you have to open the Configuration dialog box and select "Sleep". To call up the application, you can use the hotkey. The default hotkey is Ctrl- F11, but this can be changed.

Selecting an entry to be copied into a Word document or an e- mail body requires a high level of skill in using the mouse. You cannot start the selection from inside an entry, but have to start right from the beginning, and this will invariably include the entry number. When pasted on the document, it will appear in multiple lines instead of one continuous sequence of words.

Scrolling down the entries in the article page also requires you to first click once on the panel. Otherwise the scroll button will not work. This can be annoying to those who are accustomed to using the mouse's scroll button.

There is no self-correction feature, either. So if you type the name "Kennedy" with only one "n", the dictionary's search utility will simply respond with "No result found." It would be nice if the search automatically gave us alternatives that are similarly spelled -- like most online search engines do.

Quotations in the area of politics seem to be limited in number, too. I got no results when searching for Alexis de Toqueville. Nor did the keywords "grassroot" and "constituent" return any results. "Democracy" and "parliament" respectively returned only one result.

How does the Oxford Dictionary of Quotation stack up against the Penguin Dictionary of Quotations that I reviewed last June? When I searched for quotations from Marshall McLuhan (do you remember "The medium is the message"?) in the Penguin, I got only two entries. Using the Oxford, I got six -- including his famous "Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher".

Certainly, this does not tell us that one is more complete than the other. However, because of its superior ease of use, I prefer Oxford's. By docking the input field on the title bar, this program is far less intrusive than Penguin's browser-based suite. All in all, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations is more user-friendly and more useful than the Penguin, thanks in most part to iFinger's better interface.

Clearly, iFinger actually wants us to buy more than just one reference material from them. To really enjoy instant access to information, you should purchase the Oxford Encyclopedia and the Oxford World Encyclopedia. Unfortunately, buying these would cause a significant dent in my savings account.