Introduction
My hope is that Wunderkammer is simple and intuitive enough not to require any user's guide. I invite you to go off and use the program without reading this guide and see what happens. If you encounter any problems, you can always come back here and see if there is any help available. I do realise, though, that there are people who will not touch anything until they have read and annotated the user manual. If you fall into this category, you are of course welcome to read the documentation first.
Installing and running Wunderkammer
There are two files needed to run a Wunderkammer dictionary: wunderkammer.jar and wunderkammer.jad. These files come in every Wunderkammer dictionary distribution, such as the Kaurna dictionary demo MIDlet, or they can be produced for any electronic dictionary by following the steps in the Guide to importing dictionaries into Wunderkammer.
To run a Wunderkammer dictionary on a mobile phone, the two files wunderkammer.jar and wunderkammer.jad must first be transferred to the phone. The files could be transferred from a computer using Bluetooth, removable memory cards or a USB connection, depending on what options are available on the phone and the computer the files are being tranferred from.
If a phone has internet access, it may also be possible to download the dictionary directly from the internet on to the phone. For instance, the Kaurna dictionary demo MIDlet can be downloaded by opening a phone's web browser and taking it to the address http://www.pfed.info/wunderkammer.jad. Note that the mobile network operator may charge extortionate fees for the data transfer. It costs nothing to transfer the files directly from a computer to the phone using any of the methods described in the paragraph above, however.
It should be fairly straightforward to install (if necessary) and run the files once they have been transferred to the mobile phone. There is too much diversity in mobile phone models to be able to describe the steps required here. Information about how to install software on particular phone models can probably be found in the phone manual or online.
Since Wunderkammer is a Java ME program, it cannot be run in Java SE, the standard environment used on desktop computers. To run a Wunderkammer dictionary on a computer, it is necessary to use an emulator. A good free cross-platform emulator is microemulator. Note that microemulator does not support playing back sounds stored as mp3s and so it is not possible to hear the sounds associated with entries when Wunderkammer is run through this emulator.
Using Wunderkammer
The first screen that appears when Wunderkammer is loaded is a menu. Menus allow you to browse through the dictionary. An example of a menu is shown in Figure 1 below.
You can scroll through the items in the menu by pressing the up and down keys on the directional button. To select an item from the menu, press the centre button.
When there are a large number of items in a menu, a text box will appear above it. You can use the keypad to type text into the box. The list of items in the menu will be reduced to only those that contain the text you typed. This can be seen in Figure 2.
You can use the left and right directional buttons to move the cursor forward and back through the text you have typed. The clear button can be used to delete the text you have typed letter by letter.
Menu items that link to entries may have speaker and image icons on their right. The speaker icon indicates that the entry has sound and the image icon indicates that the entry has images. This can be seen in Figure 2 above.
In the entry screen the lemma for the entry is shown in the title bar at the top of the screen. The content of the entry is shown underneath. You can scroll through the content using the up and down buttons. An entry screen can be seen in Figure 3 below.
When an entry has sound, there will be a 'play' button available. Press the play button to play the sound. Some entries contain links. To follow a link to a menu or to another entry, scroll to the link and select it by pressing the centre button.
You can go back at any time to the screen you were previously looking at by pressing the 'back' button. When you are at the top level menu - that is, the menu that loaded first when you started Wunderkammer - pressing the back button will quit the application.
Version 1.2 of User's guide to Wunderkammer, James McElvenny (first name followed by the at sign and then pfed dot info), 4 Juni 2009