The Short Story

Our development team has been hard at work to get the crunch in WordCruncher even better. Lately, we’ve been developing a copyright management system for books still under copyright. This will enable us to add more books to our bookstore. We’ve also made huge strides in getting a system down that will allow us to port the Windows version of WordCruncher to Mac (and maybe even Linux down the road). Lastly, we have an update for the Search Vocabulary report that will make searching with WordCruncher that much nicer.

DRM – Copyright Management

One of the main reasons that our bookstore has a modest selection of texts is that we haven’t ever implemented any copyright protection features. We’ve been working with Deseret Book to get new titles into our bookstore, but we want to make sure their contracts are kept, which includes protecting books from being copied wholesale.

While designing copyright protection, we want to make sure that it will stop people from copying entire texts but still allow researchers and readers to take snippets (without being bothered by too many pop-up menus). We also want to implement a method so that researchers who need to copy more than the default settings can request to get a higher or unlimited copy quota.

Copyright protection will open the door to having more copyrighted content into WordCruncher, and we are confident this will be a better implementation of DRM than Amazon Kindle or Apple Books. Having copyright protection could potentially lead to having massive corpora in WordCruncher, so be on the lookout for some really exciting language corpora in the future.

Mac Development

Once we finished massive upheavals of the Neighborhood Report, Phrase Compare Report, and much more, we realized that we would need to make all of the same changes from the Windows version to the Mac version because the code for the two operating systems is completely separate. After debating what our next steps should be, we decided that we should work towards making a common library of code that could be used for both the Windows program and a future Mac program. This common library has taken several months to build, but we’ve finally finished creating it.

The next steps are to rebuild the Windows program, make sure every feature works the same as before, and then focus on the Mac version of WordCruncher. We recognize that this is a sidestep to getting a Mac version out there. We are anxious, as many of you are, to have it available, but we believe that in the future, the common library will reduce the time needed to develop new features for Windows and Mac.

If you’re interested in being a beta user for our Mac user, let us know by emailing us at wordcruncher@byu.edu.

Search Vocabulary Report

Lastly, we have a minor yet important update for the Search Vocabulary report. Right now, this report shows you a list of all the words found in your search and their frequencies. That’s about it. Here is another pain point: it’s not case insensitive, so you can get multiple listings for the same word with different capitalization. People that are familiar with Excel can condense such a list, but we want to make it easier for everyone.

Here are the main 4 changes to improve your study with the Search Vocabulary report:

1. Words will be case insensitive, so it will combine any words that are capitalized differently.
2. If you searched for a phrase, the phrase will be shown as a phrase instead of broken up into individual words.
3. The report will be sorted by frequency, so you’ll see the most frequent words or phrases first.
4. You can double-click on any word or phrase, and it will filter your search results window accordingly.

Below is a demonstration of a search for the ADJ VERB.