You can integrate Alpus with the operating environment on which it's run for a better user experience.

Desktop:
Every time the main window is activated/focused, Alpus looks for a query written to a file named ".AlpusQuery"
in the current user's home folder. This is the IPC or inter-application communication mechanism of the app.

For example, on Mac OS X  systems, you can create a system service, say "Look Up in Alpus", to look up text
in Alpus from any other application. Here is an OS X Automator example script:

[Run Shell Script, pass input as arguments]
echo "$1" > ~/.AlpusQuery
open -a "/Applications/Alpus.app"

Android:
You can throw an Intent with action "com.ngcomputing.fora.action.LOOKUP" and string extra "HEADWORD" to look up in Alpus.

iOS:
The URL scheme to launch Alpus is alpus://lookup/<word>. The parameter <word> should be percent-encoded utf-8
and is required.