Japanese dictionary app

The side project that I have worked on the longest is my Japanese dictionary app called "Matane". It's a reference to a school book we used in French class called "À plus", which means "see you later".

As a Japanese language learner, this app has obvious use to me, but of course there are other digital Japanese dictionaries on the market - a lot of them, actually. But at least when it comes to Android apps, none of them felt like a modern Android app to me.

Another property of a dictionary app that I find interesting is that it offers the chance to integrate some app features into it that you can hardly use when building it as a website, for example by offering a widget for searching, making use of the device's cameras and so on.

As you would expect from a dictionary, the app allows looking up words, taking a look at its meanings etc. Japanese has the interesting property of using multiple scripts, including kanji, which can be described as adopted Chinese characters. Therefore, a Japanese dictionary app should not only include definitions of words, but also serve as a character dictionary.

Matane is a native Android app built with modern Android development best practices. Android libraries are mixed with lightweight KMP modules. Screens are always built for multiple form factors, making use of the latest Material frameworks for building adaptive layouts.

The app is made using the following technologies:

• UI is built with Jetpack Compose.
• Navigation using Compose Navigation 3.
• Data is stored locally using Room and Datastore.
• Depedency injection using Koin.
• Modules per architecture layer are unified using Gradle Convention Plugins.
• Automatic tests for architecture and naming convention compliance using Konsist.
• Build and test steps for CI/CD are defined using fastlane.

Since I also use Matane as a means to learn technologies like the ones mentioned above, I only use AI as a better search engine and for code reviews when working on the app.

If you want to see a project where I use AI agents to generate code, please take a look at this repository.