Chinese Toolbox

24/04/2024

Just a quick note about Chinese Toolbox download sites. Currently, the most recent version is available only at chinesetoolbox.com. One urgent need is to update the website with current info, and to configure certain files to enable downloading from mirror sites. My only problem now is time -- development at learningstarz.com has me occupied for at least a few more weeks. Anyways, I hope some of you are finding Chinese Toolbox to be useful. Happy Chinese learning!

Chinese Toolbox -- software for learning Chinese through reading

05/02/2024

The second minor update of Chinese Toolbox 24.1 is now online.

31/01/2024

Chinese Toolbox has resurrected! This is the first update in over five years. For a long time, I wondered if I’d ever get the CT project going again. Its renewal has everything to do with particular experiences of and friendship with an incredible person, Jesus Christ. Let me know if you want to know more.

Before downloading, please read these notes, as they are important to properly set up and configure Chinese Toolbox:

• Chinese Toolbox still only runs on Windows. Work has been done to moderize the code for porting to other platforms, but this release does not expose those changes.
• The MD5 checksum for “ChineseToolbox.zip” (if you want to check the download integrity) is aae2bd1c05a9a7516f52e1ac7930a00f. I used the MD5 utility at https://www.winmd5.com/ to create this checksum.
• Chinese Toolbox is available as a ZIP file. You should decompress this file and place the contained folder under your primary Documents folder, but not under the “Documents\Chinese Toolbox” folder.
• Your “Chinese Toolbox [version] Program Files” will then be the program folder for Chinese Toolbox. In this folder, there is the ChineseToolbox.exe program, and this is the file you’ll execute (double-click) to start the new Chinese Toolbox program.
• “Documents\Chinese Toolbox” is your Chinese Toolbox “document folder”. This is where your customized program data is stored.
• The first time you run Chinese Toolbox, certain files are copied from the program folder to your documents folder. As you use Chinese Toolbox, certain actions will create new files in your documents folder that represent your own Chinese Toolbox data.
• Do not change anything in your Chinese Toolbox program folder, except for updating the MDBG dictionary file, cedict_ts.u8.
• If your Chinese Toolbox documents folder does not exist, it will be created the first time you run Chinese Toolbox.
• After running Chinese Toolbox once, you will have two crucial folders as relating to Chinese Toolbox: your program folder and your documents folder. These two folder paths may look something like this on your computer:
C:\Users\your_account\Documents\Chinese Toolbox Program Files
C:\Users\your_account\Documents\Chinese Toolbox
• If you have been using a previous version of Chinese Toolbox, you already have a Chinese Toolbox document folder. When you start the new Chinese Toolbox, it will load your former data, keeping the same look and feel as the previous version.
• The chinesetoolbox.com website is being updated with more information about the new features of this release.
• You can download the new program at https://chinesetoolbox.com/Download/download.htm.

Wishing you pleasant learning with Chinese Toolbox, and a pleasant Chinese New Year, coming a few days from now.

19/12/2023

I am very pleased to announce that earlier this month I had a fantastic breakthrough, solving the biggest problem that had prevented the release of a new version of Chinese Toolbox. With that problem behind me, I'm expecting to release the new version in January. It is very exciting to re-energize this product with a new release. Wish me luck!

21/11/2022

One guy asked about the Chinese Toolbox business. Well, Chinese Toolbox is just a project that I worked on quite intensively for over 10 years, one that I worked on while learning Mandarin. After a while the program became very useful to me, especially in my study of Chinese characters, and I figured that others might find it useful, too. The project sat idle for several years, but now new development is taking place, modernizing the old code and morphing it into web, Android and iOS versions. Let's see how it goes.

04/11/2022

If you like using Chinese Toolbox, it must be disappointing for there to be no updates. So I want to be straight with you about what's going on, on the CT front.

For the last two years I've been developing a new educational platform into which I'm expecting to migrate much of the original Chinese Toolbox project. This project is learningstarz.com, and our private school in Taiwan has been using this daily for almost a year now. I plan to evolve this project for the worldwide educational market with services for online learning, with particular emphasis on education in the English and Chinese languages.

Chinese Toolbox was developed for Windows using a way-outdated development IDE, Borland C++. I have significant expertise now in developing web applications using a Microsoft open-source development and deployment platform called ASP.NET Core. There are many problems that have to be addressed to do another Windows-based update of Chinese Toolbox, and my preference at this time is to take a bit more time to develop a truly modern version of Chinese Toolbox using modern technologies, and to get away from operating system dependencies as much as possible. Considering that I know my way around ASP.NET Core very well now (with about six years experience with this set of bundled technologies), I think migrating Chinese Toolbox to the web is the way to go.

There is one annoying message that appears when you launch the current version of Chinese Toolbox, but it does not affect in any way the features or usability of the program. This message is due to changes in Internet and server technologies since its release, and it appears because CT cannot connect to the backend server, which did little more than logging anyway. I wish I could "just do it" and release a new version without this error and which looked great, but as an individual developer, I have serious time constraints, and I have to focus on where to best invest my time. As always, when there's more CT news to report, it's here that you'll hear about it. Happy learning!

LearningStarz (LS) is a school, course and class management platform being designed and developed to improve the quality and experience of educating young people, removing as much drudgery as possible and replacing it with efficiency and ease of use. It is intended firstly for private schools in Tai...

17/06/2022

Recently, as I renew the Chinese Toolbox project, I've come across some new technologies that are going to be very useful in modernizing this old C++ code. For the last six years or so, I've developed almost exclusively with Visual Studio and .NET, so it's nice to see Microsoft pressing the cutting edge forward. I've heard about Blazor projects for a while, but I didn't realize until recently what is possible with Blazor, that even C++ code can be rebuild for Blazor and run in a browser. This, indeed, is very exciting. Then, today, I came across this: Introducing .NET MAUI -- One Codebase, Many Platforms. This is going to get interesting!

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-dotnet-maui-one-codebase-many-platforms/?ocid=AID3031635&utm_issue=June2022

16/05/2022

Through the encouragement of one who has used Chinese Toolbox for years, I am now shifting this project to the forefront. I would like to release the product as it exists now, but there is one problem that simply must be fixed before releasing it. I work on Chinese Toolbox almost daily now, and I wish I could give you an accurate release date. What I can say is that I will do my best to get it out as soon as possible, and that I expect my work for this next release to take days or weeks, but definitely not months.

28/02/2022

One other tip until the new version of Chinese Toolbox is released: The currently downloadable version of Chinese Toolbox was written during the time of Windows XP and Vista. It will work in Windows 10, but it doesn't look right. If you enable Compatibility mode for Chinese, the window borders will appear as they should, and everything just looks a lot better. Here is a screenshot showing setting Compatibility mode.

28/02/2022

I just noticed that the download links were not working. I've got this fixed, so you can download Chinese Toolbox again at

Download Chinese Toolbox 2012

13/10/2021

A big thank-you for all the Likes. These really get my attention. I am currently juggling two projects, learningstarz.com and chinesetoolbox.com; both are very important to me. There are quite a few things in Chinese Toolbox that I've worked on in recent years, a big one being Shared Library support for sharing and categorizing articles that you enjoy in your Chinese studies. This feature and modernizing the interface are two big tasks that I'm working on. Modernization of the interface involves porting a lot of old C++ code from Borland C++ to Visual Studio. So hang in there with me. I promise to release a new version as soon as I'm able. (By the way, I'd love to open this project up to other developers; just got to figure out a good strategy. I've currently got sharing set up on github for LearningStarz; however, that is private for now.)

28/08/2021

I'm fully into Chinese Toolbox again. I'm setting up my new development environment including a new GitHub repository. I'm coming across a lot of interesting things. Thought I'd share a screenshot of all Chinese Toolbox windows from the 13.1.0.4 version.