(Sorry for the late post. Things got piled up.)
The other dictionary I am using is Akebi. It is currently in beta.
It offers simple word lookup, recognizing kanji from handwriting, and word lists, which are the same as notebooks in Aedict.
The interesting thing is the more complex search. If you enter a set of kanji, you get a tab at the top displayed for each kanji. For example, if I type in 今回, I get two tabs, one for the first kanji [今], and one for the second [回]. Then, at the bottom, I get the full word, and the definition “now, this time”.
So, this dictionary can’t act as a translation aid, like Aedict can. Too many kanji pop up, and the individual tabs become too hard to see.
But, for words, what Akebi does that I like is to show all possible words if you do a wild card search. Like Aedict, you can use a 先? or ?先 wildcard if you want only one kanji, but you can use 先* to get a list of all words that have 先 as the first kanji character.
The search results are displayed in a sort of irregular grid, and tapping on a result will disply the dictionary entry for that word at the bottom of the screen.
I like this irregular grid in some ways, because it is a less cluttered view of words you are looking for. If you want to drill down into a particular word and all its information, then you can.
Overall, Aedict also wins on the simplicity of the user interface. Aekebi has a lot packed into it, and some things I don’t understand, like multi language support (using something other than English to enter search terms).
Aedict is still my main dictionary, because it offers more features I want to use, but Aekebi hasn’t gotten uninstalled yet, and I’m interested to see what the author will do with it.