Low-End Competition

[mikelove]

Interesting Article on Application Ratings... http://goo.gl/5jVI

Helps justify my caution about introducing OCR - those 1-star words are exactly the sort of things people would be likely to post if they couldn't recognize a document correctly on their first try.

(your other article seems to have gone missing... did you forget to actually insert the link to it?)

I think what he's suggesting is that charging for features on a la carte basis is confusing. The alternative might be to eliminate the features a la menu, keep the three basic, complete and professional bundles, and keep the a la carte only for the dictionaries. I think that's the way it works for Palm and WM still, right?

It is - we wanted the a la carte options on iPhone since we wanted to lower the barrier to entry for new users; make things a bit more "app-like" by letting them pick up one or two cool little features at a lower cost. Simply going from a free app to a $50 one without anything in between seemed like it would scare too many people off who hadn't already heard of us.

There are certainly some advantages to charging for modules the user doesn't yet know they might need (such as, in my case, the spoken vocabulary modules, since at the time I downloaded Pleco (March) I had no intention of ever speaking Chinese, or the flashcard module, which I'm certainly likely to use but wasn't inclined to pay for.)

Certainly, and that actually helps to justify charging less for the bundles than for their constituent components - people might not pay $15 for the flashcard module, but if they get it included for free for the same price as the modules they actually wanted then why not take it?

Users often don't know what will be useful to them until after they try it out. There's this guy "Mike Love" for example who doesn't seem to know just how awesome a good stroke order module could be.

Oh I do, I just differ a bit in how I define "good" - I'm much more excited by component breakdowns than pretty fonts.

I'd certainly be happy if all the features came in a single bundle. The question in my mind continues to be: is $49 seemingly too expensive for the naive user, even though he'll end up spending much more if he buys the add-ons individually? How price-sensitive are the users of Pleco?

There are two groups now, I think - people who found us through our website / word-of-mouth / school recommendations / etc, who are probably willing to pay $50 (or $100 or $150) because they know how much value they're getting for their money, and random App Store browsers who downloaded our free app, liked it, and think they might like to upgrade; those people are much less likely to shell out $50 for an add-on to this iPhone app they just discovered an hour ago. The former group are very near and dear to us - the core of our business is still word-of-mouth - but the latter group has some incredible growth potential if we can sell to it properly.

Hmm. I can't Mike will have to look at his sales data to see how popular the the features a la carte option is. If such a la carte sales are low, that would suggest that using the a la carte approach to increase sales by lowering the entry-level price may not be working. On the other hand, if there are more sales of the handwriting recognizer as an a la carte option than sales of the basic bundle, then you could say that the a la carte approach is achieving its intended effect.

A la carte sales are quite strong - a la carte handwriting sales and bundled handwriting sales are actually not that far apart. A la carte iPhone sales are several times greater than total Windows Mobile + Palm sales at this point, and would probably even be enough on their own to sustain Pleco as a viable business if we didn't sell a single bundle. So certainly nothing to sneeze at, and not something I'm eager to lose unless we'd be getting even more sales by convincing those same people to buy full bundles instead.

 

[radioman]

It would appear I did forget that link - now provided below.

http://goo.gl/fqHg

 

[mikelove]

Seems to be a link to the PlecoForums new post submission page

 

[gato]

He might have been referring to this article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/healt ... 7mind.html
Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits
By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: September 6, 2010

 

[radioman]

Well... it is good to see gato making some sense (thanks!)

Yes thats the right one... too much late night work...

 

[mikelove]

That is interesting - suggests that we ought to put Alternating testing more front and center; it actually was in the early Palm/WM 2.0 flashcard betas but we switched to "simple" subject selection because the test setup screen was getting too confusing.

 

[Entropy]

I just demo'ed eStroke and Pleco to the nice lady who runs the nice Sichuan restaurant up the street. She (as well as the customer who had an iPad on his table, for whom I was actually doing the demo) was rightly impressed, and she and the customer were discussing the details of an iPad purchase just to run these tools.

This makes me wonder, how does a Chinese person find Pleco? They have no idea what species that fish is (do Chinese people keep aquaria?) and searching for what they see, namely 鱼, is not going to get them very far on the iTunes store.

~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>

 

[gato]

Maybe you can add 汉英 、英汉字典词典 as keywords.

 

[mikelove]

This makes me wonder, how does a Chinese person find Pleco? They have no idea what species that fish is (do Chinese people keep aquaria?) and searching for what they see, namely 鱼, is not going to get them very far on the iTunes store.

Honestly, part of the reason we don't try harder to sell Pleco to Chinese people is that we don't really even feel like it's a good value for them - there are other products that are both cheaper and better-suited to the needs of Chinese speakers learning English than ours. Much of the cost of Pleco goes to royalties for things like stroke order diagrams and handwriting input and explanation-rich Chinese-English dictionaries that Chinese speakers aren't likely to find especially useful.

But were there any particular areas of Pleco that these folks were interested in? Perhaps we're missing out on some value we can bring to that market...

Maybe you can add 汉英 、英汉字典词典 as keywords.

Doing a search for 汉英词典 on iTunes just now yielded a bunch of other products that aren't ours, so that's actually a good point - would help explain why we do so poorly in the download rankings in iTunes stores in Chinese-speaking markets. So thanks for making me check on that; even if we're not actively trying to sell to Chinese speakers learning English, we're happy to have them download and use our free app if it boosts our rankings and gets us in front of people for whom the paid upgrades would be more useful.

 

[Entropy]

But were there any particular areas of Pleco that these folks were interested in? Perhaps we're missing out on some value we can bring to that market...

Not particularly; it's just the tool I'm familiar with. It's mostly the iPad+HWR they're impressed by. But if you added a food dictionary, that would certainly make it very appealing to restaurant owners in the US.

~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>

 

[WangYuHong]

Hi all,

I'm new to the forums (and to Pleco), but a long-time studier of Chinese... (Like, almost 10 years now, off and on) I acually recognize Gato's name from another forum I visit off and on (chinese-forums). I'd say I'm at the intermediate/upper intermediate level, and a lot of the learning material isn't suitable at my level (or the material that is suitable doesn't hold my interest long enough to keep studying). Due to work I need to get more serious about studying this time around, so I spent some time searching for resources which would help me study while also bringing me up to a standard level of fluency.

In my search, I found these forums and spent some time reading them. I found this thread particularly interesting because it shows a little behind-the-scenes of marketing software in general (and iPhone apps in particular). I'm responding to this thread because I'm in that niche of the market that you're having trouble attracting (the casual shoppers/casual learners). While obviously one person's words shouldn't be taken as the ultimate truth, I hope it gives you a little perspective into our mindset.

I. How I qualify as a casual-shopper?
I've owned an iPhone since January (closing in on 10 months now), and in that time I've never paid for an app (until Pleco, that is). Never! I have 130 apps on my phone, and all of them were free.

II. Why don't I spend money?
Well, my wife calls me cheap... that's probably a big part of it. I know a lot of the apps would be great deals at $1 or $2, but I'm also aware that a bunch of tiny purchases adds up to a large monthly bill. That's what I'm afraid of.
The free apps I find are usually one of two categories:
a) Random finds. Browsing the app store and find something that looks interesting, so I just download it.
b) Searching for specific functionality. I'm usually looking for an app to do one or two things really well, so I look at what's available. Most of the time, there's a free version (or a demo, or an ad-supported version) that's "good enough." It may not do exactly what I want, or it has limitations, but most of the time the difference between them and the paid apps is not worth the price difference between the two.

III. What was I looking for to help my Chinese studies?
a) The very first thing I did was download a C-E/E-C dictionary. The KT-dict was the highest-rated free dictionary at the time (back in Feb), and it was good enough (it didn't have all the words I looked for, but it had most of them). Compared to the paid apps of $20-$35+, this was a no brainer. And I know now that the reason for those prices is the due to the publishers and royalties (not just greedy developers), but as a casual consumer seeing a jump from $1-$2 for games to those prices was quite a shock.
b) A chinese book-reader. This was my idea to study chinese without actually *studying* Chinese. (Reading actual novels/newspapers/etc. feels a lot more meaningful than passing Chapter X of "Learning/Studying/Practicing Chinese" textbook (though to be fair, I have a large number of those as well). For this app, I wanted something that handles Simplified Chinese, and allows me to add my own texts (either as files or as downloads from the web). There's quite a few of these apps out there, and a couple passable free ones as well.
c) A flashcard app. I've used ZDT to study in the past, so I know that a good flashcard program is very important. This is where there's a distinct lack of free alternatives. There's a couple demo apps, which have fixed card sets, or have a very limited number (10 cards? 100 cards?). The only remarkeable app that stood out is iSRS. The free version is ad-supported and requires an internet connection. This would work for most of my study sessions, except for those times I'm stuck on the plane with nothing else to do (this is where my iPhone sees heavy usage). Most flashcard apps were in the $5> range.

IV. Why not Pleco?
Honestly, I didn't even know your app existed, even though I searched for dictionaries (back in Feb), and document readers (Sept), and flashcard programs (Sept). This is probably a great difficulty for you: getting the Pleco name out there. Unfortunately, I also don't know how you could improve on this part. I initially downloaded Pleco as another dictionary app, but I didn't really spend any time playing with it until I read about people using it for flashcards on the chinese-forums. (And this is where word of mouth helps you, I actually remember people talking about this years ago when it was only a Palm app, so I knew it had a good reputation)

V. Even though I downloaded it, why did I still hesitate?
Well, the other dictionary app came first, and until it fails me I probably wouldn't bother with other dictionary apps. Then I heard about all the other things the Pleco app can do. It all sounded really impressive, but since I'm reluctant to part with my money without first trying things out first. (That's probably why so many Lite apps exist in the market).

Here's something that was very confusing for me. I figured out that Pleco can download extra stuff, and saw that there's paid upgrades as well as free upgrades. Naturally I downloaded all the free ones (which I think were just various dictionaries). At this point, I had a very nice dictionary app, but no way to tell if the flashcards, the doc reader, or the stroke diagrams were worth the price of the upgrade. All I saw was a list with the $ button next to them. Only after I purchased the bundle and started downloading did I get to the next screen on a few of them which showed that there's a demo version available. I think this should be highlighted somehow. Either find a way to move them onto the free list (maybe a restricted version supported by ads?), or else add a note somewhere telling me to look for the demos.

Also, a demo of the doc reader would be nice too. The one thing I was hoping to find (and didn't find in any of the free apps) was a Simplified-Traditional converter for the app. (Or at least Traditional->Simplified, since I want to focus on Simplified first). I saw that the main dictionary has this functionality, but I couldn't tell from the documentation if the reader supported it as well.

VI. Why did I eventually purchase the Pleco bundle (I got the basic)?
It took me so long because I honestly didn't know what I was missing. I had a dictionary app, I had a doc reader app, and I had a flashcard app (with great limitations...), why should I spend money (and while $50 for the bundle is a good deal compared to the ala carte prices, it's still a bit of a sticker shock compared to other iPhone apps)? I bought it because of the integration between all the parts. That's what I was missing with my other solutions. The ability to create a flashcard list, and lookup the chars in words on the fly (and even add them as new flashcards) is awesome. Reading a document and looking up words is cool, and adding them to a flashcard list is even cooler. It's the integration points that I think demonstrate the most value of the software. People serious about studying will know that SRS is important for flashcards (and where Pleco is valuable for its great flexibility), but for casual studiers that point is often lost on them.

I bought the Basic bundle earlier this week and am excited about it. I'm using it very frequently, and don't regret the purchase at all. As a side note, it's hard for me to see the value of the other bundles (Professional and ... Expert? I forget). They only add more dictionaries to the package. Maybe this is really important, and they are truly valuable deals, but I can't really tell that and the price difference (mostly due to royalties, I understand) is too big for me to find out. Again, the dictionaries I have are "good enough."

So if I could leave things with a couple ideas/suggestions that you might consider:
1. Get the word out about the reader and flashcard parts as well as the dictionary. These are huge bonuses, but I dind't remember seeing Pleco while searching for them.
2. Make the demo upgrades easier to find. As a thrifty person, I need to see value before I buy. Demos or ad-supported versions are key here. But even something as simple as adding it to the free list instead of buried in the paid list would suffice. (I did click on the first couple, which happen to be the bundles, to get an idea about the prices. Once I saw what range they were in though, I stopped clicking so I never found the demo versions of the flashcards, stroke orders, or audio parts)
2a. I remember reading how multiple programs help bumped up some of your competitors. Have you considered adding a "Lite" version of Pleco as a separate app? Even something that's ad-supported would do.
3. Pleco's integration between all the difference components needs to be highlighted somehow. A dictionary is cool, and a reader is cool, but having a reader where I can easily look things up in the dictionary is awesome. (And it is really really easy to do in Pleco). Same with the dictionary/flashcard integration.


And as a separate request: I'd like to second (or third, or fourth) the call for a traditional-simplified converter for the other parts of the app (especially the reader). After reading some of the discussion on these forums, I never realized how difficult it can be (Simplified -> Traditional really needs some good logic behind it). But at the very least, shouldn't a simple Traditional -> Simplified converter be easy enough? I always thought Simplified was a subset of Traditional (or is there something else I'm not understanding?)


Anyway, thanks for reading all of this. I'll try to follow-up with any questions or clarifications you have.
Best of luck to Pleco and Mikelove! I look forward to a lot of great things from this software!

Wang Yuhong

 

[mikelove]

Thanks for this very thoughtful posting - really nice to get this sort of outsider perspective.

Here's something that was very confusing for me. I figured out that Pleco can download extra stuff, and saw that there's paid upgrades as well as free upgrades. Naturally I downloaded all the free ones (which I think were just various dictionaries). At this point, I had a very nice dictionary app, but no way to tell if the flashcards, the doc reader, or the stroke diagrams were worth the price of the upgrade. All I saw was a list with the $ button next to them. Only after I purchased the bundle and started downloading did I get to the next screen on a few of them which showed that there's a demo version available. I think this should be highlighted somehow. Either find a way to move them onto the free list (maybe a restricted version supported by ads?), or else add a note somewhere telling me to look for the demos.

Very good point - it's been a longstanding problem, especially for handwriting (where you can only try it out if you happen to tap on "Full-screen Handwriting" under "Paid" and discover the "Try Handwriting Now" button). The question is how we do that without making our software feel like it's full of ads / constantly trying to sell you something; that'll just send people packing for another, simpler app (like KTDict) that's not so commercial-y and we'll lose even the chance to sell them an upgrade down the line.

1. Get the word out about the reader and flashcard parts as well as the dictionary. These are huge bonuses, but I dind't remember seeing Pleco while searching for them.

We do come up in "flashcards" but not in "reader" I think - it's tricky because we have so many features and so little search keyword space. These definitely need to feature more prominently in the app description, though.

2. Make the demo upgrades easier to find. As a thrifty person, I need to see value before I buy. Demos or ad-supported versions are key here. But even something as simple as adding it to the free list instead of buried in the paid list would suffice. (I did click on the first couple, which happen to be the bundles, to get an idea about the prices. Once I saw what range they were in though, I stopped clicking so I never found the demo versions of the flashcards, stroke orders, or audio parts)

That's an interesting thought... maybe we should try temporarily putting individual add-ons ahead of bundles in the Add-on purchase page and seeing what impact that has on sales. (could even A/B test it, give half of people one order and half the other and see how they differ in their purchases)

A demo of the reader would be tricky without giving away the whole thing - maybe we could make just the Pasteboard reader function free? I'd prefer that to something ad-supported or something with an arbitrary size limit / cutoff. As far as demo flashcards, those should be coming soon - would have been in 2.2 if we weren't in such a hurry to get OCR out (probably should have waited a while longer to announce that).

2a. I remember reading how multiple programs help bumped up some of your competitors. Have you considered adding a "Lite" version of Pleco as a separate app? Even something that's ad-supported would do.

That one I'm a little worried about because the non-Lite Pleco is already free; give people two free versions, one "Lite" and one not and you're going to confuse the heck out of them.

3. Pleco's integration between all the difference components needs to be highlighted somehow. A dictionary is cool, and a reader is cool, but having a reader where I can easily look things up in the dictionary is awesome. (And it is really really easy to do in Pleco). Same with the dictionary/flashcard integration.

I'm hopeful that we can show that off in the flashcard demo version - aside from the dictionary integration, is there any particular part of flashcards that you think would have encouraged you to buy the full product if you'd seen it in the free version?

And as a separate request: I'd like to second (or third, or fourth) the call for a traditional-simplified converter for the other parts of the app (especially the reader). After reading some of the discussion on these forums, I never realized how difficult it can be (Simplified -> Traditional really needs some good logic behind it). But at the very least, shouldn't a simple Traditional -> Simplified converter be easy enough? I always thought Simplified was a subset of Traditional (or is there something else I'm not understanding?)

It should be quite easy, it's just that it's difficult to justify adding that feature in isolation without offering something to go in the opposite direction; if we offer a TC->SC but not an SC->TC converter, we're going to get inundated with emails asking how to go the other way / wondering whether they've encountered a bug because they can only do TC->SC / etc. And anyway, so much of the actual work for something like this is in designing a user interface / writing all of the code which opens and saves the converted files / testing / etc that even a reasonably sophisticated word-aware SC->TC converter would only be a little more work on top of that.

The key to a lot of future Pleco linguistic enhancements is coming up with a decent text segmenter (something to find where one word ends and the next begins); if we can get that, character set conversion and character->Pinyin conversion both become a lot easier (since SC->TC mapping can be pretty accurate if you have a giant database of SC words and their TC equivalents, and we have exactly that database in the form of the ABC dictionary), and full-text search / regular document reading get considerably improved as well.

 

[character]

Very good point - it's been a longstanding problem, especially for handwriting (where you can only try it out if you happen to tap on "Full-screen Handwriting" under "Paid" and discover the "Try Handwriting Now" button). The question is how we do that without making our software feel like it's full of ads / constantly trying to sell you something; that'll just send people packing for another, simpler app (like KTDict) that's not so commercial-y and we'll lose even the chance to sell them an upgrade down the line.

I've not seen the demos, but in the base version of Pleco, can you have most of the demos appear where the add-ons would? You would have to finesse showing the user an upsell message and indicating the demo is a demo so it's not too annoying. Aside: It's not really fullscreen HWR, on the iPhone, right? It's just a larger entry field. Don't know if you want to change the wording just for clarity.

That's an interesting thought... maybe we should try temporarily putting individual add-ons ahead of bundles in the Add-on purchase page and seeing what impact that has on sales. (could even A/B test it, give half of people one order and half the other and see how they differ in their purchases)

Under add-ons you've got plenty of room for a Demos button up top.

Also, I think the $ symbol on the Paid add-ons table cells is a bad idea; a $ is often used to indicate "pricey." Just go with a (>) icon.

3. Pleco's integration between all the difference components needs to be highlighted somehow. A dictionary is cool, and a reader is cool, but having a reader where I can easily look things up in the dictionary is awesome. (And it is really really easy to do in Pleco). Same with the dictionary/flashcard integration.

I'm hopeful that we can show that off in the flashcard demo version - aside from the dictionary integration, is there any particular part of flashcards that you think would have encouraged you to buy the full product if you'd seen it in the free version?

You can also include text in the description or in the Add-ons section on how Pleco's integrated features solve user problems, such as using OCR/flashcard integration to make a set of flashcards for a chapter of a Chinese textbook.

 

[WangYuHong]

A demo of the reader would be tricky without giving away the whole thing - maybe we could make just the Pasteboard reader function free? I'd prefer that to something ad-supported or something with an arbitrary size limit / cutoff. As far as demo flashcards, those should be coming soon - would have been in 2.2 if we weren't in such a hurry to get OCR out (probably should have waited a while longer to announce that).

What I've seen in other apps is that they include sample text (like maybe a short story in Chinese and English), and let people use the reader on that text without limitations, but disable the importing/creating of new texts. This way they can see the full power of the reader without getting the whole thing for free. In my case at least, this would've shown me enough to understand its capabilities

That one I'm a little worried about because the non-Lite Pleco is already free; give people two free versions, one "Lite" and one not and you're going to confuse the heck out of them.

Agreed... I'm not really sure what you could do in this case.

It should be quite easy, it's just that it's difficult to justify adding that feature in isolation without offering something to go in the opposite direction; if we offer a TC->SC but not an SC->TC converter, we're going to get inundated with emails asking how to go the other way / wondering whether they've encountered a bug because they can only do TC->SC / etc. And anyway, so much of the actual work for something like this is in designing a user interface / writing all of the code which opens and saves the converted files / testing / etc that even a reasonably sophisticated word-aware SC->TC converter would only be a little more work on top of that.

The key to a lot of future Pleco linguistic enhancements is coming up with a decent text segmenter (something to find where one word ends and the next begins); if we can get that, character set conversion and character->Pinyin conversion both become a lot easier (since SC->TC mapping can be pretty accurate if you have a giant database of SC words and their TC equivalents, and we have exactly that database in the form of the ABC dictionary), and full-text search / regular document reading get considerably improved as well.

If it was presented in the same way that the SC/TC switching is presented in the Dictionary (toggle button on the bottom toolbar), I agree that would be confusing. As an intermediate step, I suppose it could be added as a setting in the Dictionary options section. I agree that this is probably a low priority task though without the full SC<->TC functionality.

I've not seen the demos, but in the base version of Pleco, can you have most of the demos appear where the add-ons would? You would have to finesse showing the user an upsell message and indicating the demo is a demo so it's not too annoying. Aside: It's not really fullscreen HWR, on the iPhone, right? It's just a larger entry field. Don't know if you want to change the wording just for clarity.

Under add-ons you've got plenty of room for a Demos button up top.

Also, I think the $ symbol on the Paid add-ons table cells is a bad idea; a $ is often used to indicate "pricey." Just go with a (>) icon.

You can also include text in the description or in the Add-ons section on how Pleco's integrated features solve user problems, such as using OCR/flashcard integration to make a set of flashcards for a chapter of a Chinese textbook.

I like a lot of Character's suggestions. They seem like simple, clear changes to the add-on section.

 

[mikelove]

I've not seen the demos, but in the base version of Pleco, can you have most of the demos appear where the add-ons would? You would have to finesse showing the user an upsell message and indicating the demo is a demo so it's not too annoying.

Do you mean that there'd be a separate tab in Add-ons for demos? We kind of thought the Paid one would work like that - you can tap on any item in there to access its demo; perhaps we need to draw more attention to that fact.

Aside: It's not really fullscreen HWR, on the iPhone, right? It's just a larger entry field. Don't know if you want to change the wording just for clarity.

Do you mean the iPad? It's as fullscreen as fullscreen gets on the iPhone - full screen width and about 2/3 of its height - and on iPad while it's smaller than that by default there's an option in Settings / Panels to make it suitably giant.

Under add-ons you've got plenty of room for a Demos button up top.

Really? Already pretty well filled-up with 5 different tabs.

Also, I think the $ symbol on the Paid add-ons table cells is a bad idea; a $ is often used to indicate "pricey." Just go with a (>) icon.

Fair point, but I think it also indicates purchasing better than a > icon can - makes it clear that if you tap on this button you're another button tap or two away from buying the thing.

You can also include text in the description or in the Add-ons section on how Pleco's integrated features solve user problems, such as using OCR/flashcard integration to make a set of flashcards for a chapter of a Chinese textbook.

Good point, maybe even a teacher workbook / white paper down the line, though I do think we can also help the cause by showcasing some of this integration in a free version - thanks!

What I've seen in other apps is that they include sample text (like maybe a short story in Chinese and English), and let people use the reader on that text without limitations, but disable the importing/creating of new texts. This way they can see the full power of the reader without getting the whole thing for free. In my case at least, this would've shown me enough to understand its capabilities

That makes sense, though I do also like the pasteboard idea since that feels like less of a demo and more like a "lite" feature. (then again, it's also less obvious how to obtain Chinese texts for it)

If it was presented in the same way that the SC/TC switching is presented in the Dictionary (toggle button on the bottom toolbar), I agree that would be confusing. As an intermediate step, I suppose it could be added as a setting in the Dictionary options section. I agree that this is probably a low priority task though without the full SC<->TC functionality.

I think it's more likely we'd make it accessible through a menu somewhere, though there isn't a whole lot of room in the document reader either... maybe put it on the screen that comes up when you tap on the (>) button next to a document file, though I'm worried that's too difficult to find.

I like a lot of Character's suggestions. They seem like simple, clear changes to the add-on section.

So basically we'd make the add-on demos a bit more centrally located... any other way you find that screen confusing now? It's not an area we get a lot of feedback on, since people generally use it once and then never look at it again, so we'd really like to find a way to make it easier to navigate.

 

[character]

Do you mean that there'd be a separate tab in Add-ons for demos? We kind of thought the Paid one would work like that - you can tap on any item in there to access its demo; perhaps we need to draw more attention to that fact.

Mike, this time I'm writing from even more ignorance than usual. I purchased a package of Pleco on WM and AFAIK never saw the demos listed on the iPhone version. When a user presses Add-ons they screen they could see as its first element a long button "Try Demo Versions" or something. Then underneath it, your existing segmented button/a slightly shorter table view/existing footer. You could also have (for example) the HWR demo show up when the user presses the HWR button in the recognizer screen, show a suitable explanatory pop-up, upsell, etc. Again, I've not seen the demo, so am not sure this would work well.

Do you mean the iPad? It's as fullscreen as fullscreen gets on the iPhone - full screen width and about 2/3 of its height - and on iPad while it's smaller than that by default there's an option in Settings / Panels to make it suitably giant.

I thought on WM one could write over more of the UI. Not a big deal.

Fair point, but I think it also indicates purchasing better than a > icon can - makes it clear that if you tap on this button you're another button tap or two away from buying the thing.

I just think it may make people hesitate before seeing how reasonable the prices are for the Add-ons, the educational discount, etc.

 

[Entropy]

Do you mean that there'd be a separate tab in Add-ons for demos? We kind of thought the Paid one would work like that - you can tap on any item in there to access its demo; perhaps we need to draw more attention to that fact.

No, that's completely opaque. I actually thought I had to download those things to *get* the demo. You should have a separate tab for demos between the free and paid add-on tabs.

 

[mikelove]

When a user presses Add-ons they screen they could see as its first element a long button "Try Demo Versions" or something. Then underneath it, your existing segmented button/a slightly shorter table view/existing footer. You could also have (for example) the HWR demo show up when the user presses the HWR button in the recognizer screen, show a suitable explanatory pop-up, upsell, etc. Again, I've not seen the demo, so am not sure this would work well.

That might work, sort of a central place for them - some of them require you to download add-on data files first, though, which could get confusing.

I thought on WM one could write over more of the UI. Not a big deal.

You can get that sort of transparent handwriting interface on iPad too (set the handwriting background to transparent in Settings / Panels and that should do the trick), we just think the default one is better since there's about as much room as we think anyone's likely to want (at some point you're simply moving your finger too much).

I just think it may make people hesitate before seeing how reasonable the prices are for the Add-ons, the educational discount, etc.

I don't know if $ suggests "expensive" though... since the $ button is relatively well-tested I'm hesitant to risk the sales hit from changing it, though I suppose it's a bit of a gamble either way since a > could also significantly increase sales.

No, that's completely opaque. I actually thought I had to download those things to *get* the demo. You should have a separate tab for demos between the free and paid add-on tabs.

You do need to download them in the case of add-on dictionaries; there are a few features like handwriting which either don't have separate data files or have those data files built-in, so with those the demos are accessed differently. Though there's been enough confusion about this that perhaps it would be easier if we simply put an "activate demo" button on each of those pages and let people access whatever the demo UI was after enabling that.

 

[Entropy]

You do need to download them in the case of add-on dictionaries; there are a few features like handwriting which either don't have separate data files or have those data files built-in, so with those the demos are accessed differently. Though there's been enough confusion about this that perhaps it would be easier if we simply put an "activate demo" button on each of those pages and let people access whatever the demo UI was after enabling that.

The ones I was looking at were SOD and HWR... but I think there should be a demo tab, not just a "try it" button *after* you go to the paid add-on page. BTW, Amazon shipped one copy (of the two we ordered and the alleged four in stock) of the Hoenig book, which I shall see in a few hours.

 

[mikelove]

The ones I was looking at were SOD and HWR... but I think there should be a demo tab, not just a "try it" button *after* you go to the paid add-on page. BTW, Amazon shipped one copy (of the two we ordered and the alleged four in stock) of the Hoenig book, which I shall see in a few hours.

Tricky since we've already got five tabs in Add-ons and since many of the demos don't lend themselves to being accessed that way (with dictionaries you really want to go back to the main search screen). How about my earlier idea of enabling demos of the non-dictionary add-ons through the Paid add-ons tab (e.g. when you're downloading the demo of a bundle anyway) and then accessing them in the actual software locations where they'd normally be?