A couple of getting-started questions

[frances]

I've been looking at the information about the current Pleco software and what has been posted about the upcoming version 2.0. I don't know whether I'll buy before the release of 2.0 or after, but I intend to buy a copy. I love my print copy of ABC C-E and my only criticism is that the huge volume does not fit in my purse. The upcoming availability of a large E-C is exciting because I've been wanting to get a good E-C and having trouble finding one.

I've never used a PDA, so I've been doing a lot of reading since I came to this conclusion and I'm left with a licensing question:

Edit: Looking around at old messages I think I've found the answer to this question myself: It looks to me like the field of PDA OS's is broad and extremely changeable. If I choose a Pleco version would my license be permanently tied to the OS, or in a few years would I be able to switch it to the other - or a third OS that might be supported by Pleco in the future? That is, I think the answer is that Pleco can't provide free or even particularly cheap platform migrations because of various license agreements and I should try to avoid needing to migrate platforms and can expect to pay more money if the OS I choose folds up before I go PDA shopping again. I don't think this risk is going to prevent my from buying anything.

About the 21st Century English-Chinese dictionary, I haven't seen it, but I understand that it doesn't have pinyin or traditional characters. The lack of traditional makes sense given the publisher, but the lack of pinyin is surprising. Will this be the case in the Pleco 2.0 interface? It isn't a show stopper if it will since I assume I could take my search results from 21st and look them up in ABC, but I'm wondering.

 

[mikelove]

I'm afraid your license would be permanently tied to your choice of OS, if you wanted to switch to a different OS you'd have to buy the software again (though currently we do offer a 40% discount in such cases). Your best bet in terms of long-term survival would probably be Pocket PC, since Microsoft isn't going anywhere and they've never been known to give up on a platform once they've established a foothold in a market with it.

The lack of Pinyin in the 21st Century dictionary probably isn't something we're going to be able to fix in the Pleco interface, as there's not really any reliable way to automatically generate the Pinyin for a particular string of characters and we lack the resources to go through the entire dictionary and add it manually. So you would most likely have to look up words in the ABC, though with our new pop-up definition feature this should just be a matter of tapping on or highlighting the word you want to read.

 

[frances]

Thanks. I've decided that I am definitely not going to wait for the release of version 2 - in part because you keep talking about it as though the feature set isn't yet fully determined and I don't want to wait.

I think most of my remaining questions will be answered once I have the chance to try to the software and I won't ask them now. I have ordered a PDA and will probably be able to see for myself sometime next week.