Google Android

[mikelove]

Hey Mike, so now if I'd need more dictionaries than the three offered in professional pack, I need to order them separately or I can order Pleco Complete pack for Window Mobiles and then transfer license to Android?...

You can do that, sure, but you'd have to pay $5 on Android to re-purchase stroke order and $15 if you wanted OCR, so it's not a great deal.

For me, I think just 3 for professionals Packs is too less and buy them separately is quite pricey. May be you just add new bundle ,Advanced Pro, for example,with 5 dictionaries at 139$.... How ever I opt to order all of your database if I get some discount.

We could consider something like that, I suppose, but with all of the new dictionaries we're launching this summer you might find that you'd rather spend your $40 on a different set of dictionaries than the extra ones you'd get with that bundle. There isn't really a natural bundle above the Professional now that doesn't include everything - the number of users who'd find both Guifan and Tuttle useful is actually rather small, they're intended for opposite ends of the Chinese proficiency spectrum.

However, if you PM / email me with the dictionaries you want we might be able to set up a special bundle in your case - we'd rather not advertise something as Complete when it will very soon cease to be, but we've done customized bundles for other users in the past and we're happy to keep doing it (taking advantage of the flexibility of selling through our own store).

 

[tojohnso]

I just transferred my WM license to Android. I would have expected all the modules that I had available on WM would be available on Android. However, the stroke order piece is still in demo mode.

 

[mandu]

pleco.com/android

Enjoy!

Awesome work, thanks for making it happen!

That's one more pro-bundle sold fellas


BTW, works smoothly, but with some graphical glitches on a Sony X10 running Cyangogen 7.03

(this ROM lacks GB camera drivers so OCR has to wait...)

 

[mikelove]

I just transferred my WM license to Android. I would have expected all the modules that I had available on WM would be available on Android. However, the stroke order piece is still in demo mode.

That's expected, and should have been mentioned on the license transfer page - we sourced our stroke order data from a different company on iOS and Android so it's not possible to move over the licenses to that on WM. On the plus side, stroke order is currently our cheapest Android add-on at $5 so if you want to replace it it won't put too big a dent in your wallet at least.

That's one more pro-bundle sold fellas

Thanks! (that was the first day in more than a year that we actually had the majority of our sales come from somewhere other than iTunes )

BTW, works smoothly, but with some graphical glitches on a Sony X10 running Cyangogen 7.03

What sorts of graphical glitches? Any chance you could post some screenshots?

 

[JRyn]

Do Pleco for Droid offer academic discout as in iPhone?

By the way , I'm quite surprise how well this beta working.

However , in portrait mode,it should be great if we can should two panel but separating in 2 rows instead of 2 columns as it is.

 

[mandu]

BTW, works smoothly, but with some graphical glitches on a Sony X10 running Cyangogen 7.03

What sorts of graphical glitches? Any chance you could post some screenshots?

I think it was only in the OCR mode, and that would be explained by a camera-driver problem (Sony hasn't released drivers for GingerBread) If I see anything else amiss, you'll know!

Do Pleco for Droid offer academic discout as in iPhone?

D'oh!!!

Should I (undergrad) have waited before splurging?

 

[mikelove]

Do Pleco for Droid offer academic discout as in iPhone?

Not yet - we're still trying to sort out the legalese. (now that we're selling through our own store again we may have certain obligations w.r.t. verifying academic credentials and we'd like to be a little clearer on those) There's also the business question of whether it's really worth having two separate prices when something like 2/3 of our customers are academically affiliated in one way or another - we're not even sure if we're going to keep offering them on iOS (may make more sense to just lower our prices for the remaining 1/3).

However , in portrait mode,it should be great if we can should two panel but separating in 2 rows instead of 2 columns as it is.

Good idea, and very easy to implement - do you think we'd be better off with a 50/50 split or a 30/70 like we have in the current mode?

I think it was only in the OCR mode, and that would be explained by a camera-driver problem (Sony hasn't released drivers for GingerBread) If I see anything else amiss, you'll know!

Ah, no worries then.

Should I (undergrad) have waited before splurging?

You would have been waiting a while... can't make this an official policy yet, but if we end up offering academic discounts in the finished version we'll certainly try to find a way to do right by people who purchased without them during the beta. (that's certainly within the spirit of "we'll make sure that you're not any worse off than somebody who purchases our software from our own store after the beta")

 

[JRyn]

Good idea, and very easy to implement - do you think we'd be better off with a 50/50 split or a 30/70 like we have in the current mode?

How about make it adjustable in setting?

 

[neilperks]

Hi Mike,

Agree with JRyn, making it adjustable like it is in WM version would be great

BTW. still running without a glitch on LG Optimus 2x. Still desperately looking for killer bugs without too much success

One thing, in OCR, can it read vertical text ? I was showing this off to my wife, who is local BJ, and she said can it read this?, but I failed ; I clicked on the icon on the top, which seems to be Horizontal/Vertical ?, but I couldn't notice any difference. No big deal, just don't want her to feel she's beaten me if it does

Cheers

Neil

 

[mikelove]

How about make it adjustable in setting?

That might be best, yes - probably not touch-draggable since we'd be giving up too much touchable area.

One thing, in OCR, can it read vertical text ? I was showing this off to my wife, who is local BJ, and she said can it read this?, but I failed ; I clicked on the icon on the top, which seems to be Horizontal/Vertical ?, but I couldn't notice any difference. No big deal, just don't want her to feel she's beaten me if it does

Yes, in fact you shouldn't even need to click the icon since it'll generally shift automatically once you resize the recognition area to be significantly taller than it is wide. Did it completely fail to recognize the characters or did it just not stitch them into a single word?

 

[neilperks]

Thanks Mike,

OCR works perfectly; I hadn't realised you could resize the window !!!!!!!

OK, so now I'm looking at the online iphone manual and becomes much clearer. Digging into a manual, unfortunately, is always my last resort, sorry :?

Cheers

Neil

BTW is there a printed version of the manual rather than web based ? be good to sit on the sofa, in the coffee shop, and work things out rather than having to find a computer every time :wink: Again I suppose i could always cut and past into a word document.

 

[mikelove]

BTW is there a printed version of the manual rather than web based ? be good to sit on the sofa, in the coffee shop, and work things out rather than having to find a computer every time Again I suppose i could always cut and past into a word document.

The web pages should be pretty printable too... no separate PDF version yet, we've had a few requests for one but at the moment it would basically just be a PDFed printout of the web pages so I don't know that there's much point; if we ever switch over to a multi-platform documentation authoring system of some kind we might then be able to make a proper PDF manual out of it, but for right now we're limited somewhat by the fact that we're authoring everything as static web pages.

 

[Zeldor]

Great news, just odering my Android phone. I have finally settle on HTC Desire [and knowing that you have it is good news, it should have no problems with Pleco ]. I will save up for Asus Transformer [maybe 2nd gen]. How will it looks with license for 2 devices?

 

[mikelove]

Great news, just odering my Android phone. I have finally settle on HTC Desire [and knowing that you have it is good news, it should have no problems with Pleco ]. I will save up for Asus Transformer [maybe 2nd gen]. How will it looks with license for 2 devices?

Not quite clear yet for people transferring from Palm/WM, but for new users the plan is that you'll get to install it on up to 3 devices as long as they're all yours (i.e., you're not actually using it on more than one of them at a time).

 

[piranha]

Planning to get my first smartphone (Android). I have never used Pleco, but I notice there might be two features I would like Pleco to support:

1. - Black background.
Pleco screenshots show white backgrounds. Is it possible to have an option for (amoled friendly) black backgrounds? This means to change the color of the whole app, but I think it is quite worth the effort (battery and viewing comfort).

2. - Sending handwriting recognized text to computer via wifi (Probably already requested).
That would allow using Pleco (provided it is the best chs handwriting recognition option) as a handwriting recognition touchpad for laptops and desktops.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4546 ... -over-wifi
Ideally the Windows notebook could run an ahk script for capturing text (this would be much more desirable than running a whole new process for capturing wifi text).

Thanks

 

[mikelove]

1. - Black background.
Pleco screenshots show white backgrounds. Is it possible to have an option for (amoled friendly) black backgrounds? This means to change the color of the whole app, but I think it is quite worth the effort (battery and viewing comfort).

Yes, already supported as "Night Mode."

2. - Sending handwriting recognized text to computer via wifi (Probably already requested).
That would allow using Pleco (provided it is the best chs handwriting recognition option) as a handwriting recognition touchpad for laptops and desktops.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4546 ... -over-wifi
Ideally the Windows notebook could run an ahk script for capturing text (this would be much more desirable than running a whole new process for capturing wifi text).

Possible, but honestly now that handwriting-via-trackpad has gotten popular I don't think there's that much of a market for this; if you really care about getting high-quality handwriting input on a PC you're probably better off spending a little more money to buy a pen tablet so that you can write more naturally.

 

[piranha]

Thanks for your reply

Yes, already supported as "Night Mode."

I am impressed, delighted. This is the kind of feature that annoyingly still almost never comes built in nowadays software. Thanks

Possible, but honestly now that handwriting-via-trackpad has gotten popular I don't think there's that much of a market for this; if you really care about getting high-quality handwriting input on a PC you're probably better off spending a little more money to buy a pen tablet so that you can write more naturally.

Touchpads could be useful for handwriting (although I dont know of any IME or dictionary supporting this on Windows), but inefficient for anything else. Actually I hate them and they are the reason I will never own a notebook. Apple's multigestures will always be million years away from being as efficient and powerful as a multi button mouse combined with some scripting capabilities.
Also, I am assuming Pleco's handwriting recognition has no equal on Windows NT, MacOS or Linux, and that handwriting input quality on a 4.3" phone can be as good as with a pen tablet (obsolete extra hardware that I want to avoid by all means).
Granted it's not a deal breaker, since I may get all my handwriting needs satisfied within Android (not sure atm). I just thought it may not require so much extra code (sorry if I am wrong), thus worth including that feature at least for the shake of cool or because I dont expect tablets will be replacing notebooks before 2016, and that's way far from now.

 

[mikelove]

Also, I am assuming Pleco's handwriting recognition has no equal on Windows NT, MacOS or Linux, and that handwriting input quality on a 4.3" phone can be as good as with a pen tablet (obsolete extra hardware that I want to avoid by all means).

There certainly are other handwriting systems of equal quality on Windows at least - Mac and Linux I'm not so sure about (there was one good one on Mac but I believe it hasn't been updated for a while). And while the recognition algorithm can certainly be comparable, a lot of people seem to prefer a pen over a finger for input when they're given a choice between them.

Granted it's not a deal breaker, since I may get all my handwriting needs satisfied within Android (not sure atm). I just thought it may not require so much extra code (sorry if I am wrong), thus worth including that feature at least for the shake of cool or because I dont expect tablets will be replacing notebooks before 2016, and that's way far from now.

Windows 8 should actually help to bring about that change - not sure whether their merged approach or Apple's separated one will win out, but there should certainly be plenty of finger-controlled Windows notebooks floating around next year.

But it would require a lot of extra code, unfortunately - writing an IME on Windows is tricky to begin with and dealing with network configurations / device-to-device connections / etc in order to actually send the handwriting results back to a computer would be a LOT of work.