Flashcard/bundle pricing question

[DotComCTO]

Quick question...

Was there any info on flashcard pricing for the iPhone? I want to buy the full bundle and wondered whether flashcards would be included at no extra charge when it became available - or whether there would be an additional charge regardless of the bundle that is purchased now.

Thanks!

--DotComCTO

[mikelove]

They will almost certainly be free for bundle buyers; we're just holding off on making that an official policy because of the tiny possibility that there might be some sort of problem with Apple's approval people that would prevent it. (what sort of problem I can't even fathom, but I don't like to promise something when there's any step on the way to actually offering that something that we don't directly control)

So there won't be an additional charge for flashcards if we're left to our own devices, but there's the tiny possibility that a third party might intervene, and for that reason only we're not promising free flashcards to anyone yet.

[DotComCTO]

That's great news. I will be buying the full bundle and was hoping you'd indicate that the intention is to make that free for the bundle buyers!

太好了！ 谢谢。

嘉利

[mikelove]

Yep, unless someone stops us it should indeed be free.

[mikeygow]

Excellent news. But mike. Any idea on timescale? I know you're not going to tell me how long til flashcards are released, but can you let us know a bit more about the stage of debt?

Have they been submitted yet?

[mikelove]

Not submitted yet, no - that's no longer a significant factor, actually, Apple seems to be approving our updates within just a day or two lately.

We're aiming to have flashcards ready by the time the iPhone OS 4.0 SDK comes out, which we're guessing will happen a few weeks after Apple's 1/27 press conference; as soon as that's available we want to start cranking away on an update with OS 4.0 and (hopefully) iSlate/iPad/whatever-they-call-the-Apple-tablet enhancements, in the hopes of having that ready by the time those two things are available to consumers.

So basically we're planning around that as far as how much time we spend refining the interface / how many features we cut out of the first release (hopefully not many) / etc. Some of the cool stuff we're thinking about with multitouch gestures and the like will probably be put off until a later release, since it seems like a usable but not quite fully fleshed-out flashcard system is better than no flashcard system at all.

Shaping up nicely, though - card organization is nice and streamlined, actually works very similarly to the document reader file browser. (a 2-column interface as on Palm/WM simply isn't feasible on iPhone, particularly given Apple's insistence on not allowing persistent highlights in lists)

[ciaocibai]

Hi Mike,

Sorry to be that person, just wondering how flashcards are coming along? Really can't wait for this functionality! Seems that the iPhone 4.0 SDK won't be coming out anytime soon, so hopefully not waiting for that! 3.2 should be good enough though, right? Hehe.

Keep up the good work!

Cheers!

[mikelove]

Coming along, tough to give a specific progress report really - the card management functions are proving considerably more labor-intensive than the actual flashcard tests, both because they need a more aggressive redesign ("Organize Flashcards" kind of resembles the document reader file manager now, since two-column interfaces aren't really possible on iPhone) and because they have a more complicated UI in general. But no, we're not waiting on any specific OS update, flashcards should work in OS 3.0 or later just like the rest of Pleco - the current delay is all on our end, not Apple's.

[ciaocibai]

Thanks a lot for the update, just glad to know everything is still moving along.

Really looking forward to this release!

Thanks

[eligh]

personally i was planning to wait until purchasing the bundle because i didnt want to encounter any problems and be forced to pay extra for the flashcards but i dont think i can wait much longer! So i hope it all goes smoothly and apple doesnt do something weird with pricing =)

[mikelove]

Thanks! It's extremely unlikely Apple will do anything to prevent us from offering flashcards as a free update to people who previously purchased a bundle, but since they can reject an app for any reason they feel like, we can't be 100% certain of anything until the app is actually listed in iTunes.

[llammamama]

Sounds like things are coming along nicely for the iPhone flashcard update. Once it comes out I'll probably be picking up a used ipod touch and shift my pleco onto that (along with a puchase of that C-C dictionary =). I did have one quick question about the flashcards, though:

Will adding a new custom flashcard be a simple process in the iphone version?
The need to go through 3 screens to add a new custom card (and the lack of sentence support in general) has been a pretty large impediment to my studying ever since I got on board with Pleco 2.0 for WM. A function such as "make new flashcard from input" combined with the ability to copy highlighted text to the input would save So much time.

Sorry, one more thing I couldn't find on the forum: Will Pleco for the iphone be able to display Japanese characters on the flashcards?
I know features such as searching won't be supported, however the ability to perform self-graded repetitions for imported Japanese flashcards would be great.

That said, the iPhone input (and interface in general) looks pretty slick! I'm looking forward to trying it out in April.

[mikelove]

We haven't come up with a really good UI for editing custom flashcards on iPhone yet, but the situation should be improved over Palm/WM a bit for sentence editing at least; at the moment, the custom card editor screen is basically four tappable boxes with the current simplified / traditional headwords, Pinyin, and definition, and tapping on any one of them brings up a fullscreen text editor just for that field - it works exactly the same as the experimental edit function in the document reader, actually, you can use the keyboard or the transparent-mode Pleco handwriting recognizer or hide input and scroll through the whole thing.

"Make new card to input" is a good idea, as would an option to make a new card directly from selected text - something to consider for a future update. (whatever one we finally get iPhone-style tap-drag text selection working in, maybe) We haven't done any testing with Japanese in our flashcard system yet, but theoretically at least it should work; to be honest, though, if we do find a serious problem I don't think we'll fix it until a later update since we really don't want to delay the release of the flashcard-equipped version to optimize it for Japanese.

[radioman]

I know you do not want to spend quality time on this, but I'll throw it out there anyway... Flashcard module still reasonably on track? Happy to help test. Best of luck.

[misterorange]

Hi,

Before losing my HTCI used the flashcards every day. After losing that device, I upgraded to an iPhone because other than Pleco, there was nothing user-friendly about the phone.

I'm in an intensive language course and I've really grown dependent on the flashcards. Any idea when they will be available on iPhone?

Thanks!