Glossary Lookup

I have been thinking hard about choosing and building one and only one glossary/terminology lookup tool on the iPad. It must be accessible either online through a browser or an app with content synced from desktop. The desktop portion of the app will be responsible for creating, adding, updating, and maintaining different glossaries and their entries, while the iPad is mainly used for lookup only.

Features

The lookup must (M)

  1. be fast
    • accommodate 100K entries without performance degradation
  2. be consistent and reliable (always showing expected results)
  3. search across all glossaries or choosing specific ones
  4. search in a language field or across all languages
  5. search Chinese characters (duh!)
  6. search “accented” characters
    • e.g. résumé, naïve
  7. be low cost (no more than $100 a year)
  8. allow a third field for extra info (domain, note) besides the two-language fields
  9. accommodate 100K entries without

Optional, nice to have (N)

  1. The search term disappears after predefined n seconds
  2. quickly add an entry
  3. quickly edit an entry
  4. quickly delete an entry
  5. one-time purchase, even free
  6. versatile search syntax, e.g. Proximity search
  7. sharing with colleagues, booth partners
  8. allow unlimited number of fields and length of field content

Candidates

(high to low probability of choice)

  1. InterpretBank
  2. Anki
  3. DevonTHINK To Go (DTTG)
  4. Obsidian
  5. Interpreter's Help