(to sign up for our mailing list, send a blank email to pleco-announce-subscribe@pleco.com)
Greetings,
It's been more than half a year since my last email update and things at Pleco have been quite busy.
1) Android
First, the big news: 9 months after we first announced it, the first public release of the Android version of our software is finally available; see:
http://www.pleco.com/android
for all of the details.
This is an *experimental* release of our Android software; we're making it available now for the sake of people who don't want to wait any longer for the finished version, but there are quite a few bugs / ugly interfaces, the documentation is almost nonexistent (though you can get a pretty good idea of how it works from the iPhone version documentation), and there are also a few major features missing, so if you're not very computer-savvy we'd recommend waiting for the finished version to be ready before downloading it, or at least waiting a few weeks to see what the feedback from other testers looks like in our discussion forums.
In general, though, we're very pleased with how our Android software turned out and with how much functionality we have been able to get into this first release. OCR (see below) is working beautifully on Android (both live and still, though currently only in "Lookup Words" mode), as are full-screen handwriting recognition, audio pronunciation, stroke order, and all of our add-on dictionaries. We've even gotten a significant portion of our document reader module working; there are no bookmarks or web browser yet, and it'll choke if you try to load the complete text of 红楼梦, but for short-story-sized text files and snippets of text copied in from the clipboard it works quite well.
The only major feature missing is flashcards, but even with them we've done a little better than our first iPhone release; flashcard testing is not supported yet, but we do have the database engine and the Organize Cards and Export screens implemented, so you can start adding / organizing cards in preparation for when the flashcard-equipped version is ready (or save them to a text file to use with a different flashcard app). We're hoping to have full flashcard support implemented by the end of the summer, if we don't have a finished release out by then.
The above link has more information on license transfers; users of our Palm and Windows Mobile software can transfer their old licenses over free-of-charge (though, as on iPhone, the stroke order add-on would have to be re-purchased), but unfortunately that isn't yet an option for iOS users. We've come up with a couple of possibilities for how we might be able to facilitate free iOS-to-Android transfers while staying within the limits of Apple's system (and complying with the various license agreements that we're party to), but we haven't been able to get any of them up and running in time for the beta test. We're hoping to have something worked out in time for the finished release, but if we don't manage to pull that off, we would at least plan to provide a very generous discount for iOS-to-Android platform switchers. (basically just charging enough to cover the royalties we have to pay)
Feedback and bug reports on the Android version are most welcome; the best place to submit them is in the "Android Beta Testing" forum on PlecoForums.com, you can also subscribe to the "Beta Release Announcement" topic there if you want to get an email every time we release a minor update to the beta version.
2) iPhone/iPod/iPad Version Status
My last email back in November announced the release of our new OCR module on iPhone, a system to let you instantly look up the meanings of Chinese characters and words just by pointing your phone's camera at them. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7VTo0656Rc) It's been a huge success for us, even more so since we updated it to support still images and motion detection; 6 months later it remains far and away our top-selling add-on, and the publicity surrounding it has brought in a whole bunch of new customers who'd never heard of Pleco before.
If you have a reasonably new iPhone/iPod/iPad and haven't tried our OCR module yet, the free demo version is actually quite usable - doesn't give you dictionary definitions but it does give you Pinyin for the characters you point at - so I'd definitely encourage you to download that and take it for a spin; download the latest version of our free Pleco Chinese Dictionary app from App Store, open it, tap on the menu button at the bottom right corner of the screen, tap on "Add-ons" and "Optical Character Recognizer," and tap on the button to download and try out the demo version. You need an iPhone 3GS or 4 to take full advantage of the "live" OCR system, but the still image mode is very useful too (many people actually prefer it since there's less "jitter") and that'll work on almost any device - combine an iPad with a cheap digital camera and the iPad Camera Connection Kit and you've got a fantastic Chinese reading tool.
Now that the first Android release is out the door, the pace of updates on iOS should start to pick up again. Our biggest project at the moment is a user interface overhaul; we're going through every screen and trying to make them prettier, more ergonomic and easier to use.
Central to this is a new feature we're calling "merged multi-dictionary search"; basically, instead of typing in a word and having to flip between different dictionaries to see which matches they come up with, you'll get all of the results from every dictionary in a single, sorted, duplicates-merged list, providing better information and doing it in a simpler way. That particular feature is actually likely to show up in an experimental form (off-by-default option) in a minor update we'll be putting out in a few weeks; we want to make sure it's working really well before we put it at the center of our product.
We're also going through and trying to make our actual dictionary entry formatting much cleaner and more readable; there are far too many "big blob of text" type entries as things stand now, with a beautiful high-resolution screen and easy scrolling we need to do a lot better and we're working hard to do so. Of course we'll be applying a whole lot of corrections / revisions to our dictionaries at the same time as well (the "Report Missing Word" and "Submit Feedback" commands in our software have proven quite useful).
Another major addition is sentence-length text-to-speech; we've licensed a wonderful offline Chinese text-to-speech system that we're planning to use to provide improved readings of example sentences, sentence-length flashcards, etc. We've got a couple of other really interesting ideas for things we can do with it as well. It's a bit more synthetic-sounding than our native-speaker recordings, but in general it does a really excellent job of approximating native Chinese speech. (this will be a paid add-on, but there'll likely be a large discount for owners of our other audio pronunciation modules)
Flashcards in general should be getting a number of significant improvements too, particularly in the areas of ease-of-configuration (way way way too intimidating as things stand now), statistics tracking (more detailed history and graphs), and inter-device synchronization; the new cloud data service Apple's rumored to be working on might make that considerably easier.
We're aiming to have a major update available with most of these improvements in late summer / early fall; we had originally planned to make it a bit earlier, but we'd really like the update to incorporate changes in the new version of iOS (iOS 5) that Apple's expected to announce in June at their WWDC conference. (I've got my ticket...) The last major update (iOS 4) was what made OCR possible, and we're eager to see what other amazing things we might be able to do with their latest offering. Normally Apple announces their OS updates in April, but after iOS 5 was pushed back, we decided to spend more time in April and May on Android than we were originally planning to (and release a closer-to-completion Android version) so that we can devote more of our efforts this summer towards iOS.
3) Oxford Concise
Another announcement: we've finally managed to renew our license with Oxford University Press for the Oxford Concise English & Chinese Dictionary (now known as the Pocket Oxford Chinese Dictionary), the dictionary that powered our very first product way back in 2001 and one that's still very dear to our hearts.
Our license covers the latest 4th edition of the POCD, is good on both iOS and Android, and allows us to offer free transfers for people who previously purchased that dictionary from us on another platform; we'll send another announcement with instructions once it's ready. (it won't matter at all if you've already transferred your Oxford-equipped Palm/WM license to iOS, you can still get your Oxford transfer once it's ready)
The new dictionary should hopefully be available by mid-summer, though details and pricing are still TBD.
We're actually working with Oxford on a couple of other projects as well, but we don't have any other announcements on that front as yet.
4) More Dictionaries
We've been very busy licensing dictionaries lately; along with the Oxford, the Classical-Chinese-to-Modern-Chinese dictionary that we announced late last year, and the Traditional Chinese Medicine dictionary we announced a few years ago and are (we hope) finally about ready to release, we've also now licensed the expanded edition of the Tuttle Chinese-English dictionary, and its companion English-Chinese title; a really great resource for beginning and intermediate Chinese learners.
We've also been making a big push into adding more Chinese-Chinese titles; we think they can help us in a lot of areas where bilingual dictionaries are poor or nonexistent, and even monolingual example sentences can be extremely useful in deciphering the subtle meanings of words. We've just signed (but aren't yet ready to announce the titles of) a really nice multifunction Chengyu dictionary (detailed explanations, usage notes, antonyms/synonyms, etc) and a lovely little Chinese-Chinese student dictionary, and we've got a tentative deal negotiated for another Chinese-Chinese student dictionary that would be our first title ever to be oriented around non-mainland users (i.e., the original print version is in traditional characters). We're also looking into Chinese-Chinese options for Cantonese dictionaries, though we remain hopeful that we might be able to land a Cantonese-to-English one as well. (very very slow going on that)
One area we're still aggressively shopping for a dictionary is character etymology; if anybody has any suggestions for a good etymology dictionary (bilingual preferred, but even Chinese-only is helpful) we'd love to hear them. None of the online ones have been interested in working with us, sadly, so this would probably have to be something from a print publisher. We also very much appreciate suggestions for any other particularly-good dictionary that you think we should take a look at; the success of our OCR add-on has left us with quite a bit of of extra room in our budget, and we'd love to put some of that money towards acquiring more new dictionaries.
Thanks for all of your continued support / feedback; as always, comments/complaints/questions/etc are welcome at mikelove@pleco.com.
Michael Love
Founder & President
Pleco Software
http://www.pleco.com
http://twitter.com/plecosoft
http://facebook.com/plecosoft
Greetings,
It's been more than half a year since my last email update and things at Pleco have been quite busy.
1) Android
First, the big news: 9 months after we first announced it, the first public release of the Android version of our software is finally available; see:
http://www.pleco.com/android
for all of the details.
This is an *experimental* release of our Android software; we're making it available now for the sake of people who don't want to wait any longer for the finished version, but there are quite a few bugs / ugly interfaces, the documentation is almost nonexistent (though you can get a pretty good idea of how it works from the iPhone version documentation), and there are also a few major features missing, so if you're not very computer-savvy we'd recommend waiting for the finished version to be ready before downloading it, or at least waiting a few weeks to see what the feedback from other testers looks like in our discussion forums.
In general, though, we're very pleased with how our Android software turned out and with how much functionality we have been able to get into this first release. OCR (see below) is working beautifully on Android (both live and still, though currently only in "Lookup Words" mode), as are full-screen handwriting recognition, audio pronunciation, stroke order, and all of our add-on dictionaries. We've even gotten a significant portion of our document reader module working; there are no bookmarks or web browser yet, and it'll choke if you try to load the complete text of 红楼梦, but for short-story-sized text files and snippets of text copied in from the clipboard it works quite well.
The only major feature missing is flashcards, but even with them we've done a little better than our first iPhone release; flashcard testing is not supported yet, but we do have the database engine and the Organize Cards and Export screens implemented, so you can start adding / organizing cards in preparation for when the flashcard-equipped version is ready (or save them to a text file to use with a different flashcard app). We're hoping to have full flashcard support implemented by the end of the summer, if we don't have a finished release out by then.
The above link has more information on license transfers; users of our Palm and Windows Mobile software can transfer their old licenses over free-of-charge (though, as on iPhone, the stroke order add-on would have to be re-purchased), but unfortunately that isn't yet an option for iOS users. We've come up with a couple of possibilities for how we might be able to facilitate free iOS-to-Android transfers while staying within the limits of Apple's system (and complying with the various license agreements that we're party to), but we haven't been able to get any of them up and running in time for the beta test. We're hoping to have something worked out in time for the finished release, but if we don't manage to pull that off, we would at least plan to provide a very generous discount for iOS-to-Android platform switchers. (basically just charging enough to cover the royalties we have to pay)
Feedback and bug reports on the Android version are most welcome; the best place to submit them is in the "Android Beta Testing" forum on PlecoForums.com, you can also subscribe to the "Beta Release Announcement" topic there if you want to get an email every time we release a minor update to the beta version.
2) iPhone/iPod/iPad Version Status
My last email back in November announced the release of our new OCR module on iPhone, a system to let you instantly look up the meanings of Chinese characters and words just by pointing your phone's camera at them. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7VTo0656Rc) It's been a huge success for us, even more so since we updated it to support still images and motion detection; 6 months later it remains far and away our top-selling add-on, and the publicity surrounding it has brought in a whole bunch of new customers who'd never heard of Pleco before.
If you have a reasonably new iPhone/iPod/iPad and haven't tried our OCR module yet, the free demo version is actually quite usable - doesn't give you dictionary definitions but it does give you Pinyin for the characters you point at - so I'd definitely encourage you to download that and take it for a spin; download the latest version of our free Pleco Chinese Dictionary app from App Store, open it, tap on the menu button at the bottom right corner of the screen, tap on "Add-ons" and "Optical Character Recognizer," and tap on the button to download and try out the demo version. You need an iPhone 3GS or 4 to take full advantage of the "live" OCR system, but the still image mode is very useful too (many people actually prefer it since there's less "jitter") and that'll work on almost any device - combine an iPad with a cheap digital camera and the iPad Camera Connection Kit and you've got a fantastic Chinese reading tool.
Now that the first Android release is out the door, the pace of updates on iOS should start to pick up again. Our biggest project at the moment is a user interface overhaul; we're going through every screen and trying to make them prettier, more ergonomic and easier to use.
Central to this is a new feature we're calling "merged multi-dictionary search"; basically, instead of typing in a word and having to flip between different dictionaries to see which matches they come up with, you'll get all of the results from every dictionary in a single, sorted, duplicates-merged list, providing better information and doing it in a simpler way. That particular feature is actually likely to show up in an experimental form (off-by-default option) in a minor update we'll be putting out in a few weeks; we want to make sure it's working really well before we put it at the center of our product.
We're also going through and trying to make our actual dictionary entry formatting much cleaner and more readable; there are far too many "big blob of text" type entries as things stand now, with a beautiful high-resolution screen and easy scrolling we need to do a lot better and we're working hard to do so. Of course we'll be applying a whole lot of corrections / revisions to our dictionaries at the same time as well (the "Report Missing Word" and "Submit Feedback" commands in our software have proven quite useful).
Another major addition is sentence-length text-to-speech; we've licensed a wonderful offline Chinese text-to-speech system that we're planning to use to provide improved readings of example sentences, sentence-length flashcards, etc. We've got a couple of other really interesting ideas for things we can do with it as well. It's a bit more synthetic-sounding than our native-speaker recordings, but in general it does a really excellent job of approximating native Chinese speech. (this will be a paid add-on, but there'll likely be a large discount for owners of our other audio pronunciation modules)
Flashcards in general should be getting a number of significant improvements too, particularly in the areas of ease-of-configuration (way way way too intimidating as things stand now), statistics tracking (more detailed history and graphs), and inter-device synchronization; the new cloud data service Apple's rumored to be working on might make that considerably easier.
We're aiming to have a major update available with most of these improvements in late summer / early fall; we had originally planned to make it a bit earlier, but we'd really like the update to incorporate changes in the new version of iOS (iOS 5) that Apple's expected to announce in June at their WWDC conference. (I've got my ticket...) The last major update (iOS 4) was what made OCR possible, and we're eager to see what other amazing things we might be able to do with their latest offering. Normally Apple announces their OS updates in April, but after iOS 5 was pushed back, we decided to spend more time in April and May on Android than we were originally planning to (and release a closer-to-completion Android version) so that we can devote more of our efforts this summer towards iOS.
3) Oxford Concise
Another announcement: we've finally managed to renew our license with Oxford University Press for the Oxford Concise English & Chinese Dictionary (now known as the Pocket Oxford Chinese Dictionary), the dictionary that powered our very first product way back in 2001 and one that's still very dear to our hearts.
Our license covers the latest 4th edition of the POCD, is good on both iOS and Android, and allows us to offer free transfers for people who previously purchased that dictionary from us on another platform; we'll send another announcement with instructions once it's ready. (it won't matter at all if you've already transferred your Oxford-equipped Palm/WM license to iOS, you can still get your Oxford transfer once it's ready)
The new dictionary should hopefully be available by mid-summer, though details and pricing are still TBD.
We're actually working with Oxford on a couple of other projects as well, but we don't have any other announcements on that front as yet.
4) More Dictionaries
We've been very busy licensing dictionaries lately; along with the Oxford, the Classical-Chinese-to-Modern-Chinese dictionary that we announced late last year, and the Traditional Chinese Medicine dictionary we announced a few years ago and are (we hope) finally about ready to release, we've also now licensed the expanded edition of the Tuttle Chinese-English dictionary, and its companion English-Chinese title; a really great resource for beginning and intermediate Chinese learners.
We've also been making a big push into adding more Chinese-Chinese titles; we think they can help us in a lot of areas where bilingual dictionaries are poor or nonexistent, and even monolingual example sentences can be extremely useful in deciphering the subtle meanings of words. We've just signed (but aren't yet ready to announce the titles of) a really nice multifunction Chengyu dictionary (detailed explanations, usage notes, antonyms/synonyms, etc) and a lovely little Chinese-Chinese student dictionary, and we've got a tentative deal negotiated for another Chinese-Chinese student dictionary that would be our first title ever to be oriented around non-mainland users (i.e., the original print version is in traditional characters). We're also looking into Chinese-Chinese options for Cantonese dictionaries, though we remain hopeful that we might be able to land a Cantonese-to-English one as well. (very very slow going on that)
One area we're still aggressively shopping for a dictionary is character etymology; if anybody has any suggestions for a good etymology dictionary (bilingual preferred, but even Chinese-only is helpful) we'd love to hear them. None of the online ones have been interested in working with us, sadly, so this would probably have to be something from a print publisher. We also very much appreciate suggestions for any other particularly-good dictionary that you think we should take a look at; the success of our OCR add-on has left us with quite a bit of of extra room in our budget, and we'd love to put some of that money towards acquiring more new dictionaries.
Thanks for all of your continued support / feedback; as always, comments/complaints/questions/etc are welcome at mikelove@pleco.com.
Michael Love
Founder & President
Pleco Software
http://www.pleco.com
http://twitter.com/plecosoft
http://facebook.com/plecosoft