Saturday, 18 September 2010

Fix broken dictionary app in Mac OS X Leopard



So, it seems like the Wikipedia update broke Apple's dictionary application, because some developer at Apple figured that they'd never update Wikipedia. If you change Wikipedia's MonoBook theme to something else, it stops working.

Nevertheless, there seems to be an easy fix for this (sort of). Here's what you can do for now (I think I read about this at smartassism a while ago, but I've tried to describe it a much simpler way here). The instructions pretty much tell you to revert to the older version of Wikipedia:
  1. Go to wikipedia in Safari because Dictionary.app uses Safari to load Wikipedia
  2. Log-in. If you've never done this before, you can create a new account by clicking Log-in/register at the top right of the page. While logging-in check the Remember me for 30 days box. This box will set a cookie in your computer, because you probably don't wan't to sign into wikipedia every time you want to use it from Dictionary.app.
  3. Once you log-in click on My preferences at the top right again, and click the Appearance Tab
  4. Set your skin to MonoBook and save your preferences
  5. Restart Dictionary.app and Wikipedia, the most complete and reliable source known to mankind, will work perfectly again




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