lacks advertised functionality
there is currently no icloud sync. both the bookshelf and individual collins dictionaries by the same developer advertise syncing favorites and transferring them to other devices but this function is broken which, for an app with this price tag, is unacceptable. the developer responded to an email inquiry letting me know that they are aware and have no timeline as to when a fix can be expected. i have many favorites in an individual dictionary app and after buying another one of their expensive dictionaries i am unable to use them both in the bookshelf app because there is no way of transferring all the favorites. the favorites also don’t sync between the iphone and ipad versions of the dictionary or bookshelf apps. the developer either needs to provide a fix, which honestly is not that serious of a coding job, or update the store description before people spend $18 for each of their dictionaries expecting the advertised features.
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Good but needs multi-dictionary search
This review is for both the app and two of the dictionaries (Apple won’t let me review the standalone dictionaries Ultralingua sells). The Ultralingua app itself is mostly great, in that you can have just one app for multiple dictionaries. However, unfortunately you can only search one dictionary at a time. If I’m looking for, say, an EN-ES translation of a word, I want to be able to search all my EN-ES dictionaries, not just one. It seems a single-app approach should allow this.
As for content, well, I’ve learned that more words in a dictionary isn’t necessarily better. For my EN-ES example, the main one with 75k words isn’t better/worse than the Collins 55k one. The 75k one has more technical words (e.g., isotherm). But when I asked my Mexican wife to throw a test word at me (jamaica), the Collins dictionary had it (hibiscus), whereas the bigger 75k one didn’t. This is exactly why it would be great if you could search words across multiple installed dictionaries, or at least switch easily between different dictionaries for the same search term.
As for content, well, I’ve learned that more words in a dictionary isn’t necessarily better. For my EN-ES example, the main one with 75k words isn’t better/worse than the Collins 55k one. The 75k one has more technical words (e.g., isotherm). But when I asked my Mexican wife to throw a test word at me (jamaica), the Collins dictionary had it (hibiscus), whereas the bigger 75k one didn’t. This is exactly why it would be great if you could search words across multiple installed dictionaries, or at least switch easily between different dictionaries for the same search term.
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Response from developer
Hello, the Ultralingua app does have a "Search in All" option. Tap the "books" icon to see a list of your dictionaries. At the bottom of the list is a "Search in All" option. Tap that to search all of the dictionaries installed in the Ultralingua app. Please email us at escalate@ultralingua.com with other questions. Thanks for using Ultralingua!
Fantastic but outdated
One of my favorite dictionaries, but the app hasn’t been updated.