New Dictionary License + Updated 2.0 Info

[mikelove]

We've just concluded a license for the 21st Century English-Chinese dictionary (as discussed earlier in this thread). A very exciting addition to the ever-more-painful-to-wait-for version 2.0 of PlecoDict, featuring a whopping 400,000 entries and far better coverage of proper nouns than any of our previous offerings.

The 2.0 preview page has more info, along with a slight improvement to the upgrade policy for new Basic version purchasers and preliminary pricing info about the new 2.0 bundles (we're jumping up to 5 from our current total of 3). Feedback is welcome, though it's unlikely there'll be any further change in pricing between now and when 2.0 is released.

And, sadly, there's been a slight pushback of the first Preview Release (now rechristened as a Test Release to further dissuade non-techies from downloading it) - we've got something we could probably upload next week, but it would be so thoroughly unusable that there really doesn't seem like much of a point to putting it out there, so we're taking a little more time to make sure the first Test Release is actually semi-usable for those of you who don't mind the bugs / lack of documentation / lack of support / missing features / even-more-archaic-than-usual install procedure.

 

[hairyleprechaun]

Hello Mike,

Thanks for the update. I am looking forward to PlecoDict 2.0 more than ever before.

I guess those of us who purchased the PlecoDict 1.03 Complete bundle for $119.95 after the introduction of the Hanwang Handwriting Recognizer and before July 1st 2006, will end up paying a total of $219.90 to have everything, though if someone buys the PlecoDict 2.0 Complete bundle new, they will be able to get it for $199.90?

I understand it costs more to upgrade a product, and that you need to be able to offer the Complete bundle for a slightly discounted price so that you can persuade potential customers to buy it.

Regardless, I can't wait until it comes out.

Darrol

 

[goulniky]

Mike, I also have no interest in haggling over the price of the respective packages and I understand the licencing restrictions.
But I'm not so clear about the actual packages, I'd suggest you come up with a table listing all dicts on one axis, packages on the other and tick marks where they match.
For instance, the only difference between Linguist and Complete as I understand it is the latter includes Oxford E&C, is that right?
If the 21st Century is so much more comprehensive than NWP, I guess I'll personally be quite happy with your Linguist package. And while you're talking around $200 for these bundles and that's significant for some people, having that much knowledge & functionality at your fingertips is simply priceless to me.

BTW, the 21st Century link doesn't seem to work .

 

[gato]

I guess those of us who purchased the PlecoDict 1.03 Complete bundle for $119.95 after the introduction of the Hanwang Handwriting Recognizer and before July 1st 2006, will end up paying a total of $219.90 to have everything?

The way I read it is that the upgrade will cost you $99.95 for the complete package:

http://www.pleco.com/pdpreview.html
"For customers that bought PlecoDict before July 1st of 2006 (and hence will not receive the audio / stroke order upgrades for free or at a steep discount), you can get those [i.e. audio/stroke order] plus the two new dictionaries for a total of $99.95."

 

[hairyleprechaun]

Thanks Gato.

I guess I should clarify. You are correct, Mike stated that the upgrade to get all of the new features, for those who already had the complete package including the Hanwang handwriting recognizer, and purchased it before July 1st of 2006, will cost $99.95.

The $219.90 figure is the cost of the original PlecoDict 1.03 Complete Bundle ($119.95) plus the upgrade cost of ($99.95), which equals a grand total of $219.90, and is $20 more expensive than buying the new Complete Bundle with all of the included features.

I just wanted to clarify with Mike that I had read the price update correctly.

Darrol

 

[mikelove]

hairyleprechaun - yes, $219.90 is what your total outlay would be if you bought the Complete bundle before July 1st and buy the audio / stroke order / two new dictionaries upgrade. Didn't seem like too much of a premium for an extra 9+ months of using our software

Incidentally, there will probably still be a way to get the equivalent of the current Complete bundle for the same $120 it costs now - maybe a checkbox on the Professional bundle order page which lets you add on the Oxford dictionary for an extra $20.

goulniky - yes, we probably should clarify this a bit. The Complete includes both the Oxford and the Cheng & Tsui dictionary in addition to all the stuff from Linguist, so that's why we charge $30 more for it. One thing to bear in mind is that the 21st Century dictionary does not include Pinyin, so the Oxford and NWP may be better for quick lookup of English words. Of course, in 2.0 cross-referencing will be easier than ever thanks to the new popup definition feature, so if you do occasionally need to look up the Pinyin for a few words it should be very easy to do so.

And I admit that $200 is a rather big outlay, but that's only if you want everything we offer - for the majority of Chinese learners, the $100 Professional bundle should be more than enough, and for beginning students even the $40 Lite bundle will probably be quite sufficient. So the high-end options are there if people want them, but the dictionary search interface is still the "killer app" part of PlecoDict, and that'll be available for less money than it has been since April of '03.

Thanks for the note about that link, I'll have to find another one with a product description - a Google search on the Chinese name of the dictionary should give you several detailed pages of info.

 

[sfrrr]

Arggh! It's the old bait and switch. Or maybe it's the new bait and buy trick. 8) First you make us so dependent on your program that we'd pay anything to keep using. And then you add supposedly new, supposedly essential features, jack up the price and watch us waving money at you. Me first, please, please.

I just wish you'd hurry up with all of this. My Chinese always improves a lot when I'm testing a beta--can't put PD down.

You know that all the above--except the part about not being able to wait--was a joke, right?

Sandra

 

[mikelove]

Yeah, it did sound like a joke. Though if anyone were to legitimately make that complaint I'd respond by pointing out that if the new upgrades aren't essential to you then you don't have to buy them.

The wait's no fun here either, I'm eager for the day when I'll finally be free of this particular bout of Product Development Hell and get to turn most of my attention back to the business development / marketing end of things.

 

[estudiando]

How about a $100 upgrade for current (or late buyers) customers of the professional version to get all the other dictionaries (Oxford, CT, 21st and Standard)

 

[mikelove]

Not sure about that... I'm a little worried about confusing people with too many upgrade options, and to be honest I'm not sure how many Professional purchasers are likely to be interested in adding on the Oxford when they consciously chose not to purchase it before. The fact that the extra $20 would now get them the C&T along with the Oxford is a little bonus, but it seems like it might not be enough. Anyone else want to chime in in support of this?

 

[daniu]

Hi!

As I bought the complete suite anyways I am not interested. I am more confused about the fact that the new dictionary: "Cheng & Tsui English-Chinese Lexicon of Business Terms" seems not to appear anywhere in the new offers and by the time I bought what was called complete that time it was not included ...

regards
Daniel

 

[mikelove]

The C&T is only included in the Complete bundle in 2.0, and it's not included in any bundles in the current version.

 

[daniu]

Hi!

Yes ... that's also why I am surprised that it does not appear anywhere in the update bundles ...

regards
Daniel

 

[mikelove]

That's because it is available in the current version (albeit only as its own separate upgrade) and most of the people who want it have probably bought it as an upgrade already - again, trying not to have too large and confusing an array of upgrade bundles here. The two themes for 2.0 upgrade-wise are "learn to write/talk better" with stroke order / audio and "Pleco for advanced Chinese learners" with the two big new dictionaries, adding in a business dictionary might confuse things.

(I know I'm hammering in this "confusion" point a lot, but we're trying very hard to reach out to people who've written us off as too complicated / technical / generally-weird with the new version, so it's really important that the purchase / upgrade options be as easy to understand as possible)

We could consider offering both the C&T and the Oxford as optional additions to any upgrade bundle - a checkbox on the order form that adds on one of those upgrades for an extra $20 or so. We're already considering doing this with the regular bundles, so that people can get the very popular Oxford/ABC/NWP combination from the current Complete bundle for the same price it is now (by adding the Oxford on to the new Professional one) and so that people can get a Pinyin-friendly E-C dictionary with the Linguist bundle (again the Oxford due to the restrictions on bundling the NWP/21st dictionaries together), so it's not complicating things too much by offering it with the upgrades as well.

 

[caesartg]

Hey Mike, about the marketing side of things you mentioned - Plecodict 2 will likely become the Chinese language learning killer app, but it would be a real bugger if some other crappy but better-marketed software were to take away much of its market. When I gave a presentation to the first year students about Chinese language-learning software on PDAs, I had to rely too much on their imagination to get them to take the first step in checking Plecodict out. So, why don't you produce a flash presentation aimed at both non-techie and techie students of Chinese to showcase the software and really put it into real-life scenarios that most students of Chinese will be able to relate to? (E.g. On bus in China, see a character, try to remember it for later study but forget --> whip out PDA, scribble character into Pleco, check meaning, check compound words [including non-first character compounds], add it as flashcard for later. E.g. Have to study a Lu Xun essay - get the biggest dictionary out of the library and pound through it for hours checking all the unknown and slightly archaic vocabulary --> just pop text version into Pleco and read it using the doc reader and the ABC/C-C dictionary, instantly checking the words and building up flashcards for later study.).

Maybe you could also aim a presentation towards those academics who run the Chinese departments and would take a very strong interest in academic licences? They would be impressed by such things as the high quality of the dictionaries and the fact that the software featureset supports the learner through every level of their learning from beginner (stroke order, pronunciation, games, Oxford dictionary, flashcards) to intermediate (+ABC, +document reader, +wildcard features) to advanced and even translator (+Chinese-Chinese dictionary).

Not that I'm telling you how to run your business...hehe. But with the high level of support, feedback and discussions of future versions' featuresets that you provide, clearly it's in many of Plecodict's users' interests that Plecodict does well.

 

[mikelove]

A Flash presentation is a great idea - we whipped up a demo video for a recent convention that we've been debating about posting on the website (it doesn't have any audio or other explanations about what you're seeing, hence the uncertainty about whether it would do more harm than good) but with Flash we could make it interactive and explain things as we go along.

And yes, once we went to the trouble of doing this it would make sense to do different versions for different markets - teachers, students, business folks, diplomats, there are maybe half a dozen major categories of user each of which is going to have a slightly different response to the software.

Thanks for the feedback!

Oh, and one more tiny license announcement (for anyone who's still reading this thread): we've just made arrangements to license a new set of fonts for the Pocket PC version under an unlimited-use license, which means that in 2.0 the demo and paid versions will use the exact same font files - no more ugly demo font and no more tediously uninstalling said demo font and installing a non-demo font when you buy the software.

 

[sfrrr]

Fonts sound cool. Looking forward to them. When I was into typography, I sometimes chose apps for their fonts. (I blush to think of it.)

Dui wo lai shuo, PD and ChinesePod are the perfect combo (with a few online translators thrown in--maybe). And it seems to me that since both are designed for handhelds, packages of both offered on each of your sites is a natural.

Just a thought.

Sandra

 

[goulniky]

As both a PlecoDict and a ChinesePod afficionado, I second Sandra's suggestion. Chinese-on-the-move, that's my motto, it's gotta fit in the hand and be available anytime, anywhere

 

[mikelove]

We're considering a number of options in that area, actually - it'll help matters considerably if we can get our built-in Ogg Vorbis decoder working on Palm (hoping to use that as the audio format for Pleco 2.0), since then it would theoretically be possible to package up an entire ChinesePod-style lesson (vocab + transcripts + audio) and access it within PlecoDict.

 

[Dan_78cj5]

Can't wait for 2.0!!!

Once in the past you had suggested a desk-top version or companion tool with 2.0, has that gone away, or will we be able to have any access to the dictionary, the flashcards, our flashcard files, etc. from our laptop or home computer desktop???

The fact that I have to disable the handwriting recongition software on my Palm T|X to use Pleco's is a minor frustration that increases the more I learn. The more I use Pleco, and the better I get at Chinese the more I wish I could draw characters on the screen in more of my applications, but its too much trouble to continually reset the system preferences each time I enter a program. In 2.0 will the conflicts between the Pleco chinese character handwriting recognition and the Palm one (I think it's called PenPower?) be solved?

Thanks again for your amazing software. I use it every day!