Guifan

[mikelove]

So the mystery of why it was taking so long to extend our license for the 规范词典 to the new edition is now solved: Apple's embedding it in Mac OS 10.8. (the slide from the keynote was clear enough to read the characters, I thought I recognized its definition for 龙 and I confirmed that by checking against my printed copy) It's definitely the new edition too, since they changed a few characters in that definition since the first one.

We've already licensed one potential C-C replacement for it and we're working on at least one more - assuming that we are in fact unable to license the new edition of Guifan, we'll take care of people who already bought it by giving them a free (or at least heavily discounted) copy of one of those replacements, though you would also be able to keep using Guifan - you just probably won't get the new edition.

Anyway, not an ideal situation, but it's difficult to license a dictionary when you're competing with the world's largest company for it

 

[hairyleprechaun]

I hope the replacement, if it becomes necessary, is up to par with the Guifan, as I sure do enjoy having it in my dictionary repertoire.

This might be suitable for another topic, but anyway, I must admit, I am quite impressed at Apple bolstering its Chinese language capabilities in its current and soon-to-be-released versions of OS X and iOS. This makes sense of course as China may now be the fastest growing market for Apple's products. Anyway, after the announcement of iOS 6 at WWDC 2012, I was happy to find the following on Apples iOS 6 Preview page:

New Features for China:
With improved text input and built-in support for popular Chinese Internet services, iOS 6 makes iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch even better for Chinese-speaking users. With a new Chinese dictionary and improved text input, typing in Chinese is easier, faster, and more accurate. You can mix full and abbreviated Pinyin and even type English words in a Pinyin sentence without switching keyboards. With support for over 30,000 characters, iOS 6 more than doubles the number of Chinese characters supported in handwriting recognition. And when you add words to your personal dictionary, iCloud makes them available on all your devices. Baidu is a built-in option in Safari, and you can share videos directly to Youku and Tudou. You can also post to Sina Weibo from Camera, Photos, Maps, Safari, and Game Center.

Hopefully these features won't begin to conflict with Pleco, as we are now seeing with Apple's use of Guifan in MAC OS 10.8. What do you think Mike, do you think there is a potential for conflict, even if Apple's increased Chinese language and formats support are geared towards enhancing the capabilities of its products by adding more usefulness for the Chinese user base?

 

[mikelove]

I hope the replacement, if it becomes necessary, is up to par with the Guifan, as I sure do enjoy having it in my dictionary repertoire.

Well we'll almost certainly keep offering the 1st edition at least. And we've got a couple of promising replacements lined up... I'm actually wondering how Apple handled the missing character problem, since while they could certainly afford to add images for those thousands of partial characters I'm not sure if they would actually go to the trouble to do so.

Hopefully these features won't begin to conflict with Pleco, as we are now seeing with Apple's use of Guifan in MAC OS 10.8. What do you think Mike, do you think there is a potential for conflict, even if Apple's increased Chinese language and formats support are geared towards enhancing the capabilities of its products by adding more usefulness for the Chinese user base?

I don't think they're likely to conflict with us; this isn't a big enough market, not that many people are going to decide to buy an Apple product because they include an awesome built-in Chinese-English dictionary designed around people learning Chinese. (well, maybe in Singapore...) Adding more Chinese services may make things a bit easier for competitors - Apple does something for them and they don't have to do it themselves - but honestly so much of that has already happened that I'm not sure how much more they can do; the combination of mobile processors getting fast enough to use SQLite (= no more writing your own database engine) and iOS offering built-in Chinese font support and a built-in Chinese handwriting recognizer (= no more writing the former and licensing the latter) was what made it possible for other people to come along and produce decent Chinese dictionary apps without spending years at it like we did.

A built-in Chinese-Chinese dictionary isn't really doing much of anything for any competitor, nor is it discouraging people from buying our app (not even really the Chinese-Chinese part of it, since Apple doesn't include a direct search interface for their iOS dictionaries); improved Pinyin input can only help us, and with speech recognition, since we don't offer it now and haven't been successful at licensing a speech recognition library we don't really mind Apple putting it in the OS (and in fact plan to use it), and if we somehow do successfully license one in the future people will still buy it if it works online.

 

[Yiliya]

I noticed recently that nciku now has this dictionary on their website, and it's the new edition as well. How come they were able to secure a deal and you weren't? They're also a small company.

 

[mikelove]

I noticed recently that nciku now has this dictionary on their website, and it's the new edition as well. How come they were able to secure a deal and you weren't? They're also a small company.

nciku isn't small at all - they're owned by a giant Korean internet portal (Naver). However, we are actually still talking to FLTRP about this and several other dictionaries - we lost touch with them for a while (due to a combination of some staffing changes and a couple of embarrassingly failure-prone email servers) but we're now very much in business with them again and remain hopeful about the second edition.

 

[mikelove]

Update: nciku doesn't have the new edition as far as I can tell; in the new edition, the first definition for 龙 reads:

传说中的神异动物，有角、鳞、爪、须，能上天入水，兴云降雨

while in both their version and ours it reads:

传说中的神异动物，有鳞、爪，能上天入水，兴云降雨

 

[Yiliya]

nciku isn't small at all - they're owned by a giant Korean internet portal (Naver)

No longer true.

http://blog.nciku.com/blog/en/2012/05/2 ... -and-free/

We are asking for your support with a donation to nciku. At our core, we are a small company ...

Basically, nciku was a department in NHN (Naver) in 2007. Since 2010, we are an independent start-up, so we don’t have the same financial support as we have had in the past.

They also closed a lot of their services recently, simply because they couldn't pay the server fees.

 

[mikelove]

No longer true.

http://blog.nciku.com/blog/en/2012/05/2 ... -and-free/

This is actually rather interesting... I wonder if we could scrape together the capital to put in an acquisition offer (and if they'd be interested if we did); the synergy is pretty obvious, our website sucks and they haven't had much success with apps.