(not a whole lot of news here that people following us here or on Facebook / Twitter / our home page don't already know, but just to give you the complete version
Greetings,
One big announcement and some status updates to share with you today.
1) Pleco for Android Released
After about a year-and-a-half in development and 8 months of beta-testing, our Android software is finally officially available; more details at:
pleco.com/android
It should work on any device running Android 2.2 or later, and since we're selling it directly through our own website along with Android Market, you can get it even if your device doesn't support paid Android Market apps, or for that matter if it doesn't support Android Market at all (works great on the Amazon Kindle Fire, e.g.).
Also, previous customers on Palm, Windows Mobile, *and* iOS can transfer their licenses to Android for free. If you bought Pleco originally on iOS (and hence are able to use that copy on multiple devices), you can even keep using it on iOS after you activate it on Android. See:
pleco.com/androidxfer.html
for more information on license transfers. Please note that this is a one-way transfer - transfers from Android to iOS are not currently possible, and may not ever be.
Pleco for Android licenses can be in use on up to 3 devices at a time - you activate all of them with the same "Registration ID."
We're doing two interesting experiments with pricing for our Android app.
First, instead of offering educational discounts we've simply lowered our prices a bit to somewhere in between the educational and non-educational prices on iOS; since roughly 2/3 of our iOS customers claim those discounts, we figure this approach might be easier for everyone, and at the very least will result in fewer panicked emails from people who accidentally order the wrong version. However, if we get a lot of complaints, or we find that sales suffer due to the lack of that discount option, we may consider moving back to the way we do things on iOS.
Secondly, we're actually giving away our handwriting recognizer add-on module for free on Android until June 30th. This is partly a way to increase our download numbers and hence our store ranking (which took a long time to get up to where we wanted it to be on iOS), but we're also doing it because the handwriting situation on Android is generally a bit more complicated than on iOS: there are several other free Chinese dictionary apps on Android that include handwriting recognizers, while there aren't really any that do so in any serious way on iOS, and there are also third-party handwriting input methods available for free on Android that (unlike the handwriting input system built into iOS) are fullscreen and quite accurate. The existence of those free third-party IMEs also allowed us to license a handwriting recognizer for Android under considerably better financial terms than we could get on iOS, which is what made this free handwriting promotion possible.
We actually released our Android app about a week ago, but held off on this email announcement because a) we had some payment processing issues that we wanted to make sure were Google's fault rather than ours and b) we didn't want it to get buried in a pile of Chinese New Year week email; on the plus side, we've already released four bug-fix updates in the past week, taking advantage of the fact that Android updates don't have to spend a week waiting to be reviewed / approved before they're released, so you should get a relatively stable and glitch-free version of Pleco when you download it.
My sincere thanks to everyone who downloaded the beta version, especially those of you who sent in feedback - you've literally made this product possible, and I hope you'll feel some of the same pride I do in the finished result.
2) Pleco for iOS Status Update
There's been quite a bit of email lately concerning the slow pace of recent updates on iOS, and specifically the fact that the big UI revamp which we've been talking about for a while now is still not finished. The reason for the delay is simply that it took a lot longer than expected to finish our Android app; since late summer we've been working on little else besides Android, and in fact for most of the past year (since the last major iOS update, 2.2.2, came out in February '11) it's been occupying the majority of our programming time. While certain aspects of Android are very programmer-friendly, there's a lot of hardware / OS fragmentation (many more manufacturers / screen sizes / processor speeds / memory capacities / file storage configurations / camera resolutions / etc), and also a lot more hardware-specific bugs - iPhones certainly have hardware bugs too, but we only have to deal with one new model of those per year, while on Android there are several dozen. (8 of the top 10 devices in use among our beta-testers didn't exist when we started developing our Android software)
I don't really like ignoring our iOS customers for this long, but I'm convinced that focusing our energy on finishing up Android was the right business decision: like it or not, Android is here to stay and if we hadn't released an Android version soon we might have been left out of that platform altogether. Personally, I'm not giving up my iPhone 4 or my iPad anytime soon, and with Apple having just sold 37 million iPhones in Q4 of 2011 I think a lot of people agree with me on that, but our business is much safer on two platforms than on just one, and the diversity and ubiquity of Android devices means that we can reach a lot of customers we couldn't before. There are perfectly Pleco-capable Android phones available contract-free and unlocked for US$80, and Pleco-capable Android tablets available for US$200, prices that iPhones and iPads generally only reach on the used market. And in many countries, including both China and the US, iPhones are not yet available on every major cell carrier, so customers who for coverage, cost, or other reasons prefer a particular carrier have had no way to get Pleco on their smartphones. There are also customers who need dual-SIM-card phones, or phones with larger screens, or phones with built-in hardware keyboards, or ruggedized phones, or phones with their cameras removed so that they can be used in secure government facilities - in short, there are an awful lot of people who we simply couldn't accommodate on iOS.
But the Android port has benefits for our existing customers too, especially since we're offering free platform transfers; for the last year, even among our iOS users the most popular single "feature request" has been for us to release an Android version, and the fact that iOS licenses can continue to be used after activating them on Android lets us accommodate the growing number of people who use a tablet running one platform and a smartphone running the other. (strangely enough, there seem to be far more people using an iPhone and an Android tablet than there are using an Android phone and an iPad, in spite of the iPad's dominant tablet market share) There are also an enormous number of customers who bought our software back in the Palm and Windows Mobile days and have been holding onto their old Axims and Treos and so on because they didn't want to get an iDevice, so we're very happy to have an alternative available for them. Being on two modern platforms instead of one also helps to open some doors for us licensing-wise - companies are much more interested in licensing their dictionaries to you if you can single-handedly cover most of the world's smartphone users, and the extra revenue potential from all of these new users makes some licenses financially feasible that previously weren't.
In addition, Android has given us an opportunity to develop and test a lot of new cross-platform features that we'll soon be making available on iOS as well, taking advantage of the large number of interested Android beta-testers and the fact that it's so much easier to openly distribute and rapidly update Android than iOS software (owing to the lack of an app review / approval process). Some examples of cross-platform upgrades that are now finished, debugged, and working pretty well on Android (though a few are off-by-default "experimental" features), and hence also more-or-less ready to go on iOS:
That's enough for a pretty big update by itself, but there are other parts of the iPhone UI that we still want to improve further - particularly the Settings screen and the iPad optimization of some not-currently-very-iPad-friendly screens - so we're still not quite ready to release it. There are also a few more new features we really want to get into 2.3, like text-to-speech audio (so you can listen to entire example sentences, have it read longer passages of text to you, etc). And there are a few longstanding UI issues (like the insertion point losing its place when switching between handwriting and keyboard input, and the fact that tap and tap-hold text selection use two different interfaces) that we think we may finally be able to work around now that most people are running iOS 5.
But we really want to get some sort of significant update out to you guys soon, so we're trying to nail that extra stuff down as quickly as possible so that we can release 2.3 with all of those other improvements ASAP. So I'm optimistic that 2.3 will actually - at long last - come out sometime *this* spring. (personally, I'm getting married May 19th, and it'd be really nice to go off on my honeymoon without any more massively-behind-schedule projects hanging over me, so I have that as a purely selfish incentive to push to get this done soon)
With the Android port finally done, we don't have anything else to distract us from making our existing software better, so after 2.3 we'll be starting right up on development for 2.4, which is tentatively focused on the flashcard and document reader modules - flashcards should be getting iCloud sync, timed auto-advance, custom audio / images, and more robust statistics, among other long-awaited improvements, and the document reader should get the equally long-awaited support for full-text search, hide-able toolbars, and (hopefully) ePub documents. We're also optimistic that that'll be the release in which we get OCR working with PDF files, though there's an outside chance that might even make it into 2.3.
One other little iOS note: Apple just launched a new iPad commercial in China that includes a clip of the Pleco document reader:
http://www.apple.com.cn/ipad/videos/#pl ... -tours-ads
(it's the 学习 ad at about the 7 second mark)
Other than being featured in a keynote, this is just about the highest compliment they can pay an app developer, so we're really honored by it.
3) New Dictionaries Update
I know that for a lot of people the wait for new dictionaries has been even more frustrating than the wait for 2.3 on iOS, but thankfully, the data files for all of our newly-licensed titles are now in hand (though the last one only arrived a few weeks ago) and we should finally be able to get these out in the near future as well, hopefully also this spring. These include several new Chinese-Chinese dictionaries, among them a Classical Chinese dictionary (by far our most anticipated new release - we have some pretty awesome customers) and a Chengyu one, and a number of other interesting titles too. We still haven't signed a Cantonese dictionary, but we're very close on two different ones and there's an outside chance we may even get one in time for this big dictionary release (though it'll probably take another half-year to get multi-syllable Cantonese audio recordings to go with it).
4) New Logo / Website
We finally hired an actual web designer (ryanscherf.net) to refresh our website; it's not quite ready yet, but a preview of our soon-to-be home page is available at:
http://www.pleco.com/newhome.jpg
Also, after more than a decade with the same logo (originally designed by yours truly in late 2000), we hired a designer (cresk.nl) to redesign that as well; you can see a smaller version of it at the top left corner of the above web page design, but a larger version is at:
http://www.pleco.com/newlogo.png
This does not affect our app icon, which will continue to be the now-somewhat-famous 魚 character (though perhaps with some minor shadow / lighting tweaks), but it gives us a simpler and more streamlined fish design to put on letterhead, business cards, T-shirts, etc.
The new redesign will also come with a revamped online store (now that we're on Android, which allows sales outside of their official store) and improved interactivity in general - we'll finally have a proper company blog - so it should be a massive upgrade once it's up and running. We're also in the process of transitioning to a new CDN (content distribution network) provider with much better coverage in China than our old one, so slow downloads for China-based users will hopefully soon be a thing of the past.
5) Windows Phone
Since this is generating a good bit of email lately: we have no plans to develop a Windows Phone version of Pleco anytime soon. To be honest, after spending 3 of the last 4 years working on porting Pleco to different platforms I just don't think we have the energy to do any more porting for a while. We also are long overdue for a whole lot of improvements to our existing software; we've got at least a 2-year backlog of those before we can even consider putting our current products on ice while we branch out to another new platform. If Microsoft pulls a rabbit out of their collective hats and manages to surpass Apple in market share in a few years, we might then be forced to consider a Windows Phone port, but until then I think we're going to be exclusively an iOS and Android shop. This is no slight on Windows Phone as an OS - if it had come out in 2007 I daresay we'd have jumped on board quite eagerly - but it just doesn't make sense for us to be a three-platform company right now.
6) Palm / Windows Mobile
I already announced in a previous email that we had discontinued our Palm OS software, but now unfortunately I have to say the same thing for Windows Mobile; monthly sales of our Windows Mobile software have been in the low single digits for most of the past year, most of our active Palm/WM customers have already switched to iOS or Android and we simply can't justify spending any more time on those platforms. We'll continue selling our Palm/WM software until our new website with its new online store debuts, but after that we'll probably only offer it as a special custom order to people who email us to ask for it.
We're continuing to offer free transfers from our Palm/WM software to iOS and Android, however, and will continue supplying technical support, re-downloads, and device changes for our Palm/WM software for as long as anybody wants them. So if you're a diehard Palm OS fan and want to keep using Pleco on your Treo until it disintegrates into a pile of dust, we'll take care of you.
7) Weibo
After numerous requests, we finally have a Weibo page at:
weibo.com/plecosoft
for our customers who can't conveniently get our updates via Facebook or Twitter. (we'll try to update it about as often as we update those)
8 ) 10 Years
I completely neglected to send out an announcement about this, but a few months ago marked the 10th anniversary of Pleco's first product launch - Oxford Concise English & Chinese Dictionary for Palm OS, originally uploaded to PalmGear HQ on October 1st of 2001. (I know quite a number of people on this mailing list actually bought that app in the first few weeks it was available) It's been an amazing decade, and personally I can't think of any better way I might have spent it than making Chinese dictionary apps for all of you fine folks.
So: thanks again for all of your feedback, bug reports, Christmas cards, and general friendly emails, and also for all of the continuing word-of-mouth - the convenience of modern smartphone app stores hasn't changed the fact that most of the people who actually pay for our software find out about it from friends, classmates, and coworkers, and there's no way we'd have lasted this long (as so few companies from the Palm OS era have) without your support.
Best wishes and happy Year of the Dragon,
Michael Love
Pleco Software
http://www.pleco.com
facebook.com/plecosoft
twitter.com/plecosoft
weibo.com/plecosoft
Greetings,
One big announcement and some status updates to share with you today.
1) Pleco for Android Released
After about a year-and-a-half in development and 8 months of beta-testing, our Android software is finally officially available; more details at:
pleco.com/android
It should work on any device running Android 2.2 or later, and since we're selling it directly through our own website along with Android Market, you can get it even if your device doesn't support paid Android Market apps, or for that matter if it doesn't support Android Market at all (works great on the Amazon Kindle Fire, e.g.).
Also, previous customers on Palm, Windows Mobile, *and* iOS can transfer their licenses to Android for free. If you bought Pleco originally on iOS (and hence are able to use that copy on multiple devices), you can even keep using it on iOS after you activate it on Android. See:
pleco.com/androidxfer.html
for more information on license transfers. Please note that this is a one-way transfer - transfers from Android to iOS are not currently possible, and may not ever be.
Pleco for Android licenses can be in use on up to 3 devices at a time - you activate all of them with the same "Registration ID."
We're doing two interesting experiments with pricing for our Android app.
First, instead of offering educational discounts we've simply lowered our prices a bit to somewhere in between the educational and non-educational prices on iOS; since roughly 2/3 of our iOS customers claim those discounts, we figure this approach might be easier for everyone, and at the very least will result in fewer panicked emails from people who accidentally order the wrong version. However, if we get a lot of complaints, or we find that sales suffer due to the lack of that discount option, we may consider moving back to the way we do things on iOS.
Secondly, we're actually giving away our handwriting recognizer add-on module for free on Android until June 30th. This is partly a way to increase our download numbers and hence our store ranking (which took a long time to get up to where we wanted it to be on iOS), but we're also doing it because the handwriting situation on Android is generally a bit more complicated than on iOS: there are several other free Chinese dictionary apps on Android that include handwriting recognizers, while there aren't really any that do so in any serious way on iOS, and there are also third-party handwriting input methods available for free on Android that (unlike the handwriting input system built into iOS) are fullscreen and quite accurate. The existence of those free third-party IMEs also allowed us to license a handwriting recognizer for Android under considerably better financial terms than we could get on iOS, which is what made this free handwriting promotion possible.
We actually released our Android app about a week ago, but held off on this email announcement because a) we had some payment processing issues that we wanted to make sure were Google's fault rather than ours and b) we didn't want it to get buried in a pile of Chinese New Year week email; on the plus side, we've already released four bug-fix updates in the past week, taking advantage of the fact that Android updates don't have to spend a week waiting to be reviewed / approved before they're released, so you should get a relatively stable and glitch-free version of Pleco when you download it.
My sincere thanks to everyone who downloaded the beta version, especially those of you who sent in feedback - you've literally made this product possible, and I hope you'll feel some of the same pride I do in the finished result.
2) Pleco for iOS Status Update
There's been quite a bit of email lately concerning the slow pace of recent updates on iOS, and specifically the fact that the big UI revamp which we've been talking about for a while now is still not finished. The reason for the delay is simply that it took a lot longer than expected to finish our Android app; since late summer we've been working on little else besides Android, and in fact for most of the past year (since the last major iOS update, 2.2.2, came out in February '11) it's been occupying the majority of our programming time. While certain aspects of Android are very programmer-friendly, there's a lot of hardware / OS fragmentation (many more manufacturers / screen sizes / processor speeds / memory capacities / file storage configurations / camera resolutions / etc), and also a lot more hardware-specific bugs - iPhones certainly have hardware bugs too, but we only have to deal with one new model of those per year, while on Android there are several dozen. (8 of the top 10 devices in use among our beta-testers didn't exist when we started developing our Android software)
I don't really like ignoring our iOS customers for this long, but I'm convinced that focusing our energy on finishing up Android was the right business decision: like it or not, Android is here to stay and if we hadn't released an Android version soon we might have been left out of that platform altogether. Personally, I'm not giving up my iPhone 4 or my iPad anytime soon, and with Apple having just sold 37 million iPhones in Q4 of 2011 I think a lot of people agree with me on that, but our business is much safer on two platforms than on just one, and the diversity and ubiquity of Android devices means that we can reach a lot of customers we couldn't before. There are perfectly Pleco-capable Android phones available contract-free and unlocked for US$80, and Pleco-capable Android tablets available for US$200, prices that iPhones and iPads generally only reach on the used market. And in many countries, including both China and the US, iPhones are not yet available on every major cell carrier, so customers who for coverage, cost, or other reasons prefer a particular carrier have had no way to get Pleco on their smartphones. There are also customers who need dual-SIM-card phones, or phones with larger screens, or phones with built-in hardware keyboards, or ruggedized phones, or phones with their cameras removed so that they can be used in secure government facilities - in short, there are an awful lot of people who we simply couldn't accommodate on iOS.
But the Android port has benefits for our existing customers too, especially since we're offering free platform transfers; for the last year, even among our iOS users the most popular single "feature request" has been for us to release an Android version, and the fact that iOS licenses can continue to be used after activating them on Android lets us accommodate the growing number of people who use a tablet running one platform and a smartphone running the other. (strangely enough, there seem to be far more people using an iPhone and an Android tablet than there are using an Android phone and an iPad, in spite of the iPad's dominant tablet market share) There are also an enormous number of customers who bought our software back in the Palm and Windows Mobile days and have been holding onto their old Axims and Treos and so on because they didn't want to get an iDevice, so we're very happy to have an alternative available for them. Being on two modern platforms instead of one also helps to open some doors for us licensing-wise - companies are much more interested in licensing their dictionaries to you if you can single-handedly cover most of the world's smartphone users, and the extra revenue potential from all of these new users makes some licenses financially feasible that previously weren't.
In addition, Android has given us an opportunity to develop and test a lot of new cross-platform features that we'll soon be making available on iOS as well, taking advantage of the large number of interested Android beta-testers and the fact that it's so much easier to openly distribute and rapidly update Android than iOS software (owing to the lack of an app review / approval process). Some examples of cross-platform upgrades that are now finished, debugged, and working pretty well on Android (though a few are off-by-default "experimental" features), and hence also more-or-less ready to go on iOS:
- Merged multi-dictionary search - type in a Pinyin string and get a merged, collated, duplicate-removed, frequency-sorted list of all matching entries from any dictionary.
- Multithreaded search - no more irritating 0.25 second lag between lifting a key and seeing results.
- Improved dictionary switching - in two-panel mode, you can now view the current word in a different dictionary without moving away from your current list of search results, and the dictionary icon now changes state to indicate whether or not there are entries in any other dictionaries (so no more useless tapping on the button only to discover that there aren't any other entries available). Also, switching dictionaries in the separate definition screen will no longer take you away from your original search results (instead we put up a second set of arrows when there are multiple matching words in an alternate dictionary).
- Improved dictionary entry formatting - we finally use a decent amount of whitespace, example sentences are offset with newlines.
- ~ replacement in ABC dictionary example sentences.
- Improved flashcard creation - flashcard button now changes its icon depending on whether a word is currently in flashcards, and on totally duplicated words you now get a helpful little prompt to view card info on the existing card / delete it / remove it from the current category / update it to use the current dictionary definition / etc.
- Louder audio - yes, we finally figured out a way to increase the volume without significantly decreasing quality.
- Document reader history.
- Instant dictionary switching in flashcards (tap on a button in the fully revealed card to see it in another dictionary).
That's enough for a pretty big update by itself, but there are other parts of the iPhone UI that we still want to improve further - particularly the Settings screen and the iPad optimization of some not-currently-very-iPad-friendly screens - so we're still not quite ready to release it. There are also a few more new features we really want to get into 2.3, like text-to-speech audio (so you can listen to entire example sentences, have it read longer passages of text to you, etc). And there are a few longstanding UI issues (like the insertion point losing its place when switching between handwriting and keyboard input, and the fact that tap and tap-hold text selection use two different interfaces) that we think we may finally be able to work around now that most people are running iOS 5.
But we really want to get some sort of significant update out to you guys soon, so we're trying to nail that extra stuff down as quickly as possible so that we can release 2.3 with all of those other improvements ASAP. So I'm optimistic that 2.3 will actually - at long last - come out sometime *this* spring. (personally, I'm getting married May 19th, and it'd be really nice to go off on my honeymoon without any more massively-behind-schedule projects hanging over me, so I have that as a purely selfish incentive to push to get this done soon)
With the Android port finally done, we don't have anything else to distract us from making our existing software better, so after 2.3 we'll be starting right up on development for 2.4, which is tentatively focused on the flashcard and document reader modules - flashcards should be getting iCloud sync, timed auto-advance, custom audio / images, and more robust statistics, among other long-awaited improvements, and the document reader should get the equally long-awaited support for full-text search, hide-able toolbars, and (hopefully) ePub documents. We're also optimistic that that'll be the release in which we get OCR working with PDF files, though there's an outside chance that might even make it into 2.3.
One other little iOS note: Apple just launched a new iPad commercial in China that includes a clip of the Pleco document reader:
http://www.apple.com.cn/ipad/videos/#pl ... -tours-ads
(it's the 学习 ad at about the 7 second mark)
Other than being featured in a keynote, this is just about the highest compliment they can pay an app developer, so we're really honored by it.
3) New Dictionaries Update
I know that for a lot of people the wait for new dictionaries has been even more frustrating than the wait for 2.3 on iOS, but thankfully, the data files for all of our newly-licensed titles are now in hand (though the last one only arrived a few weeks ago) and we should finally be able to get these out in the near future as well, hopefully also this spring. These include several new Chinese-Chinese dictionaries, among them a Classical Chinese dictionary (by far our most anticipated new release - we have some pretty awesome customers) and a Chengyu one, and a number of other interesting titles too. We still haven't signed a Cantonese dictionary, but we're very close on two different ones and there's an outside chance we may even get one in time for this big dictionary release (though it'll probably take another half-year to get multi-syllable Cantonese audio recordings to go with it).
4) New Logo / Website
We finally hired an actual web designer (ryanscherf.net) to refresh our website; it's not quite ready yet, but a preview of our soon-to-be home page is available at:
http://www.pleco.com/newhome.jpg
Also, after more than a decade with the same logo (originally designed by yours truly in late 2000), we hired a designer (cresk.nl) to redesign that as well; you can see a smaller version of it at the top left corner of the above web page design, but a larger version is at:
http://www.pleco.com/newlogo.png
This does not affect our app icon, which will continue to be the now-somewhat-famous 魚 character (though perhaps with some minor shadow / lighting tweaks), but it gives us a simpler and more streamlined fish design to put on letterhead, business cards, T-shirts, etc.
The new redesign will also come with a revamped online store (now that we're on Android, which allows sales outside of their official store) and improved interactivity in general - we'll finally have a proper company blog - so it should be a massive upgrade once it's up and running. We're also in the process of transitioning to a new CDN (content distribution network) provider with much better coverage in China than our old one, so slow downloads for China-based users will hopefully soon be a thing of the past.
5) Windows Phone
Since this is generating a good bit of email lately: we have no plans to develop a Windows Phone version of Pleco anytime soon. To be honest, after spending 3 of the last 4 years working on porting Pleco to different platforms I just don't think we have the energy to do any more porting for a while. We also are long overdue for a whole lot of improvements to our existing software; we've got at least a 2-year backlog of those before we can even consider putting our current products on ice while we branch out to another new platform. If Microsoft pulls a rabbit out of their collective hats and manages to surpass Apple in market share in a few years, we might then be forced to consider a Windows Phone port, but until then I think we're going to be exclusively an iOS and Android shop. This is no slight on Windows Phone as an OS - if it had come out in 2007 I daresay we'd have jumped on board quite eagerly - but it just doesn't make sense for us to be a three-platform company right now.
6) Palm / Windows Mobile
I already announced in a previous email that we had discontinued our Palm OS software, but now unfortunately I have to say the same thing for Windows Mobile; monthly sales of our Windows Mobile software have been in the low single digits for most of the past year, most of our active Palm/WM customers have already switched to iOS or Android and we simply can't justify spending any more time on those platforms. We'll continue selling our Palm/WM software until our new website with its new online store debuts, but after that we'll probably only offer it as a special custom order to people who email us to ask for it.
We're continuing to offer free transfers from our Palm/WM software to iOS and Android, however, and will continue supplying technical support, re-downloads, and device changes for our Palm/WM software for as long as anybody wants them. So if you're a diehard Palm OS fan and want to keep using Pleco on your Treo until it disintegrates into a pile of dust, we'll take care of you.
7) Weibo
After numerous requests, we finally have a Weibo page at:
weibo.com/plecosoft
for our customers who can't conveniently get our updates via Facebook or Twitter. (we'll try to update it about as often as we update those)
8 ) 10 Years
I completely neglected to send out an announcement about this, but a few months ago marked the 10th anniversary of Pleco's first product launch - Oxford Concise English & Chinese Dictionary for Palm OS, originally uploaded to PalmGear HQ on October 1st of 2001. (I know quite a number of people on this mailing list actually bought that app in the first few weeks it was available) It's been an amazing decade, and personally I can't think of any better way I might have spent it than making Chinese dictionary apps for all of you fine folks.
So: thanks again for all of your feedback, bug reports, Christmas cards, and general friendly emails, and also for all of the continuing word-of-mouth - the convenience of modern smartphone app stores hasn't changed the fact that most of the people who actually pay for our software find out about it from friends, classmates, and coworkers, and there's no way we'd have lasted this long (as so few companies from the Palm OS era have) without your support.
Best wishes and happy Year of the Dragon,
Michael Love
Pleco Software
http://www.pleco.com
facebook.com/plecosoft
twitter.com/plecosoft
weibo.com/plecosoft