OCR!

[mikelove]

But it might work great for my kids as they would be able to easily video conference me when I'm on the road. For that matter, I wonder when they will drop Facetime into iChat, etc. on the Mac. I guess that will be later as they don't want people thinking that buying one phone/device for a family is good enough, at least not yet.

I think that could come fairly soon - even if OS X 10.7 doesn't appear until late 2011, they could release a new iChat client at whatever point the next version of iLife appears. Heck, they could even develop a more comprehensive messaging / social networking / VOIP / etc app and make that part of that new iLife version - they probably need something to replace the now tragically unhip iDVD.

 

[Entropy]

So if Bluetooth IAC ever becomes reliable enough, I could send text from the menu directly to my iPad using the iPhone's camera, if I could adjust the selection area while it's OCRing. Then I could annotate it (加麻！加辣！) and hand the pad to the waiter, like Chinese people do with paper (according to McCawley.)

 

[Entropy]

Preview of one of the two big pending announcements:

http://plecomirror.com/ocrdemovid.html

Dude, your platform is iPhone and iPod. This video doesn't run on your platform,

which means I can't demo it to my friend who's learning about herbs and wants to learn to read.

The YouTube video doesn't load either.

~ Kiran

 

[mikelove]

So if Bluetooth IAC ever becomes reliable enough, I could send text from the menu directly to my iPad using the iPhone's camera, if I could adjust the selection area while it's OCRing. Then I could annotate it (加麻！加辣！) and hand the pad to the waiter, like Chinese people do with paper (according to McCawley.)

Well yes, though you'd probably get some very funny looks from other restaurant patrons

Dude, your platform is iPhone and iPod. This video doesn't run on your platform,

which means I can't demo it to my friend who's learning about herbs and wants to learn to read.

The YouTube video doesn't load either.

Not sure why YouTube wouldn't load - it works fine on all of my iDevices, though the Great Firewall could be a problem. As far as why the mirror page on our website doesn't load on iPhone, that's just laziness - didn't think very many iPhone users would actually be viewing the non-YouTube version. (kind of a big download)

 

[numble]

Not sure why YouTube wouldn't load - it works fine on all of my iDevices, though the Great Firewall could be a problem. As far as why the mirror page on our website doesn't load on iPhone, that's just laziness - didn't think very many iPhone users would actually be viewing the non-YouTube version. (kind of a big download)

The Great Firewall is the main problem. I have shown the video to many Chinese people here in China, and I always need to turn on the VPN connection beforehand (if I'm showing it on an iOS device).

BTW: ETA on beta?

 

[mikelove]

BTW: ETA on beta?

Real Soon Now® - after it wasn't quite sewn up Friday, progress on the last few bits was slowed down by Labor Day Weekend and its attendant social obligations

 

[Entropy]

Not sure why YouTube wouldn't load - it works fine on all of my iDevices, though the Great Firewall could be a problem. As far as why the mirror page on our website doesn't load on iPhone, that's just laziness - didn't think very many iPhone users would actually be viewing the non-YouTube version. (kind of a big download)

Which firewall, the one separating Massachusetts from the rest of the world? We need that to prevent your flaky power grids from crashing our extremely reliable one. Sheesh.

And I was trying to load it on an iPad. The YT version might've loaded eventually, but all I saw was a spinning cursor and no indication that data was being transferred, so I gave up. It could also have been an Atomic Web bug, i suppose. In any case, you should know better than to be using Flash.

 

[mikelove]

In any case, you should know better than to be using Flash.

Granted, but shooting that simple little demo took 3 hours and a dozen takes and I wasn't in the mood to spend an additional hour figuring out how to properly encode / embed / upload an HTML5 video

 

[Entropy]

In any case, you should know better than to be using Flash.

Granted, but shooting that simple little demo took 3 hours and a dozen takes and I wasn't in the mood to spend an additional hour figuring out how to properly encode / embed / upload an HTML5 video

Is this harder than I think it is? Why not just re-encode it as h.264 and put it on a Web page? There's no such thing as a native Flash video camera!

~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>

 

[radioman]

I too wanted to demo it. The Great Fire Wall takes Youtube off the table (and although I have a VPN, it slow sometimes on the street).

However, I believe a simple link to MP4 would work... http://goo.gl/Wcbl

1) it can be put up on a webpage to link
2) can be emailed easily (the files are not that big).
3) can be natively pulled into one's iPad/iPhone via iTunes UI

I emailed this to myself in Gmail and could just click and play on my iPad with my Gmail account within Safari.

 

[numble]

BTW: ETA on beta?

Real Soon Now® - after it wasn't quite sewn up Friday, progress on the last few bits was slowed down by Labor Day Weekend and its attendant social obligations

Aren't there 2 more days of Labor Day obligations?!

On that note, have you thought of providing betas to Engadget, Gizmodo, 9to5mac, tuaw, and the like?

 

[character]

Aren't there 2 more days of Labor Day obligations?!

Yeah, I'm beginning to think chucking my Labor Day plans to camp out in front of Pleco headquarters was a bad idea. :wink:

Perhaps Mike discovered it could only OCR LOTR.

 

[gato]

Is it out?

 

[mikelove]

Is this harder than I think it is? Why not just re-encode it as h.264 and put it on a Web page? There's no such thing as a native Flash video camera!

Yes, but we'd have to have a fallback / auto-detect for the large number of web browsers that can't handle HTML5 web video properly.

However, I believe a simple link to MP4 would work... http://goo.gl/Wcbl

Yeah, it probably does make sense to put up an MP4 version too, maybe with the updated demo of the finished version - no sense in making people fiddle around with an FLV downloader app if they want an offline version.

On that note, have you thought of providing betas to Engadget, Gizmodo, 9to5mac, tuaw, and the like?

Maybe, but I think we're going to need at least one more beta release to get the interface reasonably refined.

Is it out?

No, sladep just accidentally posted here instead of the beta tester forum (forgot to add him to the user list for that forum) - sorry for the confusion.

 

[Pampuk]

Bonjour,

I'm planning to buy an iphone version to complement my old palm/wm licence but I've got 2 questions I couldn't find the answer :

- is the Ocr include into bundles : basic and pro (by the way, can you make a bundle with all the adds-on (present and future), excluding any dictionary. As french, I'm only interested in Chinese to english dictionary (and french, of course)).

- will it possible to use OCR with a photo (taken from pleco or from the album), as it seems easier to take a photo in the street or in a retaurant and then put down the phone and look at definitions.

thanks again

 

[singlung]

- is the Ocr include into bundles : basic and pro (by the way, can you make a bundle with all the adds-on (present and future), excluding any dictionary. As french, I'm only interested in Chinese to english dictionary (and french, of course)).

in the announcement on http://www.plecoforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2433 mike said he would exclude ocr from the bundles.

- will it possible to use OCR with a photo (taken from pleco or from the album), as it seems easier to take a photo in the street or in a retaurant and then put down the phone and look at definitions.

in the experimental beta there is a function doing exactly that. i am quite happy with it so far, but just with photos of texts, haven't tried signs or sth like that yet. we will see if it will be available in the final version.

 

[character]

http://gizmodo.com/5629880/how-to-turn- ... ope-for-10 <-- Interesting video showing how to extend the camera with 3rd-party optics, send video to an iPad, etc. I wonder what solutions people will come up with for OCR if the new iPod Touch turns out to have Mr. Magoo vision?

 

[radioman]

... there has GOT to be a way (sooner or later) to easily have your iPhone as the puedo video camera for the iPad. I believe that there already is for still photo shooting, but have not seen anything in video.

 

[character]

... there has GOT to be a way (sooner or later) to easily have your iPhone as the puedo video camera for the iPad. I believe that there already is for still photo shooting, but have not seen anything in video.

I'm not sure if ZCam or BlueCam support video. Given the license for Pleco (buy it for one iDevice, and you can install it on all other iDevices you own) if one needed to OCR something, one could just use Pleco on the iPhone directly. Is there a video over wifi/BT standard? Doing a quick search makes me think that even if there is, standalone wifi/BT cameras are too expensive to make it worth making Pleco OCR work with them.

It's ironic that this great new feature for Pleco for iPhone is another reason to make a dedicated Pleco device: so it could have a camera which will work for OCR. I would have to think the percentage of 3GS and 4 iPhones is perhaps only 20% of the iDevices which can run the rest of Pleco.

 

[dustpuppy]

Honestly, pleco is so good, it warrants buying an iphone 4 just for that. Compared to what I spend on my lessons, the price of the phone is quickly amortized.