iPhone Demo Video

mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Interesting question... would this be for classroom / kiosk use (no random / off-subject browsing), child protection (no age-inappropriate browsing), or some other purpose?

You could block web browser access without blocking access to the rest of the software if you simply disabled / had us disable / didn't purchase the built-in document reader, but that would also lose access to the reader for text files and such. It wouldn't be too difficult for us to add a password-protected option to disable the web browser without disabling the rest of the document reader, I suppose, though it's a little tricky because we'd have to also check for / block outside links in local HTML documents in order to avoid creating an easy security hole.

Adding a whitelist / blacklist for web sites would be more difficult, however, though if there's demand for it I suppose we could consider that in a future release.
 
N

numble

状元
If it's going off of wifi, you could set up a whitelist/blacklist at the router itself, which would also be better for your desktop use, since smart users can figure out how to disable client-side filtering.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
On a PC yes, on a closed system like iPhone it's a lot harder - they'd probably have to jailbreak the phone in order to get at / manually reset Pleco's configuration files.
 
E

ewilc773

秀才
The purpose would be for filtering content, but simply disabling web browsing all together would work as well. The iPhone software allows parental lockout for specific internet-capable Apple applications (such as Safari or Mail), and one giant switch for locking out all third-party applications. If the iPhone software had a parental switch for turning off Wi-fi that would work, but it doesn't. :(

A whitelist / blacklist would be great too, but I know that would probably be a lot of trouble unless there are a lot of people who want it.
 
R

rapoto

探花
I know this is of the topic - and I am aware that this is a PLECO Forum... but I thought that maybe someone would know how this works:

The iPhone remembers words that are typed which are not in the dictionary so far (in Chinese too). Does anyone know how to access that file, edit it, or make a back-up?

Thanx.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
ruisi1 - pretty good, assuming no major hassles from Apple's end.

rapoto - I don't know any way to access that, but it seems to add words automatically if you enter them frequently.
 
H

hongwei2

Member
The video of Pleco running on the iPhone looks amazing -- count me as a new customer (never purchased Pleco before) who will be clicking "buy" just as soon as it shows up on the App Store. If it's there by Thanksgiving, I know that I'll have a chance to show it to Chinese-learning friends... who may also become new Pleco customers!

One question about how in-app purchases will work: If I purchase an additional dictionary on my iPhone, will I also be able to sync that dictionary to my iPod Touch, using the same iTunes account? Or will I have to purchase the dictionary for each device (something I really hope I won't have to do)? Thank you!
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Thanksgiving seems doubtful, given Apple's current projected two-week wait for app approvals and the likely glut of submissions of new apps for Christmas (though I'm hoping the real rush for that will begin a week or two into December from people try to be at the top of the downloads list on 12/25). But hopefully it'll be submitted by then at least.

How things will work with In-App Purchases on the same iTunes account is very much in Apple's hands at this point - there's a way we'd like to handle that that I think everyone will consider reasonable, but I don't want to give any specifics here for fear of people reading this and taking it as an official policy statement when it's actually something Apple can overrule us on. (also why I've been so adamant about refusing to say anything regarding upgrades / license transfers from other platforms / etc)
 
L

LuoZhiHua

Member
I'm so happy to hear that Pleco will be coming to the iPhone. I've been putting off my upgrade to the iPhone for awhile and this was a big reason. Birthday is coming and so is my phone. I'm excited to hear it won't be long!
 
C

charnobo

Member
I am impressed with the video of Pleco for iphone and it looks like a solid dictionary.

I have been in China and bought a Besta S701 english-chinese translator which can also translate sentences.

Can Pleco do sentence translation now or is it planned for the future ?

If not, is there any other app for iphone that can translate sentences english-chinese , chinese-english offline ?

I know about Google translation services, but I would not like to pay for data abroad.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
You can translate a sentence in Pleco word-by-word; bring it up in the document reader and move through dictionary definitions for each word in it using arrow buttons. As long as you know at least a little Chinese it's a pretty effective way to read texts.

As far as translating an entire sentence at a time, though, I really don't think that technology is there yet - it's a cute gimmick, but even the mighty Google can barely come up with intelligible translations, so developing a good/usable sentence translation engine of our own would be way beyond our capabilities.
 
J

jejohnston

Member
ewilc773 said:
I noticed that the iPhone version will have a built-in web browser. Is there any possibility of using the iPhone version of Pleco without having unrestricted internet access? Unlike a desktop computer, as far as I know, there's no way to install a filter that will block what pages other applications open. The only way I know of is to block applications, which would unfortunately make Pleco unusable.
Click to expand...

Information at the website below suggests that the Pleco app will need to be rated 17+ if it allows unfiltered internet content through it's built in web-browser. Doubtless the majority of Pleco's users are adults, but it is a bit strange to have an adult rated dictionary.

http://appreview.tumblr.com/post/148433 ... e-rated-17
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Actually both the web browser and the fact that we're not censoring any entries mean that we have to rate it 17+ - not that big a deal, really, parents can easily override those controls for their kids in a specific case like this, and any other dictionary that isn't censored is going to have to be similarly adults-only-rated.
 
S

sphinxolution

Member
Iphone version

Hello Mr. Love,

I read about Pleco Dict on your product website and I recently saw the announcement for an Iphone port.
Looks really awesome! I'm looking forward to buy an Iphone + Pleco when the app is released.
(just a little bit sad, that there won't be any port for android phones..)

I have got two questions about it:

1) Will there be a possibility to combine the live mode with Iphone OCR software like Abbyy MOCR (http://www.abbyy.com/mobileocr/), scancam, babelshot, etc. ? (I also saw that dragon naturally speaking is now being ported for the Iphone - maybe that's a possible combination too?)

2) Will the new Iphone application have a multi-format import funktion for .xml, .pdf, .txt, .pdb, .prc, etc. files? (that would be very helpful for the purpose of importing chinese texts, other dictionary libraries like handedict/cc cedict and manually generated flash cards like for the New Practical Chinese Reader Books - available on http://china.panlogicsoftware.com/ebooks.html)

I'm sorry for my English's bad.

that's it so far.. thank you!
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
1) Does Abbyy (or another one of those OCR programs) have an iPhone app? If so, does it support copying out blocks of text using the pasteboard? Assuming it does, you could bring the text into Pleco that way. Same goes if Dragon supports the pasteboard.

2) .txt, .html, .doc, .rtf, and are all supported to varying degrees - .txt is the best option, though, it's the only one that always supports tapping on a character/word to look it up. .doc/.rtf you have to go through the pasteboard for that, .html you normally have to go through the pasteboard but can get around that with short documents using the experimental Live Mode option.
 
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