I would like to create an iMessage App that allows users to lookup a word in a multlingual dictionary. So user would tap an hold word and them be prompted to do a lookup in our app.
It's not clear from the docuementation that this is possible. Maybe I'm reading the wrong doc.
Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.
As far as I can tell, your application concept fails at the technical detail level--there's no "tap and hold, then do something" functionality for an extension.
There are a variety of ways that you could implement a dictionary extension to be used in iMessages, but I'm pretty sure that any access that you're going to get to previous text is essentially going to come from the user copy/pasting.
I actually think the bigger problem is that iMessage apps can't "read" what people write for privacy reasons. Now granted your idea means the user is selecting text which might somehow side-step it, but still seems like a stretch. And as NotMyName points out, even selecting the text is difficult. Seems you can copy an entire message, but not single out one word.
I think if you wanted to do this, your easiest version 1 just involves a field they type the word into and it returns the meaning. At least that would gauge how many people are interested in the app.
