Recently I have been developing a mobile application called LexiconMe. I have a very good friend, Dionysis, who is currently leaving and working in Sweden. Dionysis, faced a problem, which it seems that most people who decided to leave in Sweden faced the same problem. This is the communication problem and the right use of the words in sentences and phrases.

So he contacted me with his idea which was to build a lexicon app for the Swedish language. The app would support not only the translation of the word, but also examples, synonims, idiom etc. In Sweden there is a useful service called Lexin which does exactly that. Although someone can find a lot of information when translating a word, its main issue is that it’s really old, lacks of an API and it’s neither user nor mobile friendly.

What we did? Simple, we created a mobile application for Android and iOS which uses the service. We went a few steps further, by adding quizzes and tests using an advanced learning technique called Leitner System and more. I will talk about the features and its details later.

LexiconMe feature

1. 1.Translate from 21 languages to Swedish (language support can be found on app’s description on Google play store
   

2. 2.Create offline dictionary with the most common words
   

3. 3.Find the most frequent words users search per language
   

4. 4.Listen how the word pronounced
   

5. 5.Create backup of your offline dictionary on Google Drive
   

6. 6.Download your back up on any device using your Google account (useful if you want to transfer your dictionary from one device to another)
   

7. 7.Take the tests and improve your Swedish skill level (this feature is under development)
   

The app was built using the latest Cordova version and AngularJS 1.x. It’s really amazing how things have been improved on Cordova applications with all these frameworks available.

Feature 5 and 6 is the topic of this blog entry!

What we wanted to achieve was to be able to upload, download and delete files created from the application on user’s Google Drive. We created a very useful plugin to this job called cordova-plugin-jc-googledrive. The plugin is open source and lies on Github and npm. It follows the same setup standard as the rest of the Cordova plugins, so it’s very easy to install and even easier to use!

Currently it supports the following functionalities:

1. 1.Download file
   

2. 2.Create/Upload file
   

3. 3.Delete file
   

4. 4.Get file list
   

You can visit the read me page to find more information about how to install it to your project and make use of the mentioned functions. You can also request new features or even contribute by suggesting new features.