iPhone Demo Video

[coljac]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for releasing the videos. I'm not disappointed - I will be amazingly happy when I can use this, and the document feature is going to be so useful. Right now, when I want to read a Chinese SMS with characters I don't know, I have to get to my Mac and use PhoneView to extract it and paste it into Wenlin. Just one more reason to be excited about this app.

Hope the beta testers don't find many bugs so this gets out the door ASAP.

 

[crj]

I forgot to add, the iPhone in China is 99% likely NOT to have WiFi... (many will of course buy in HK to get the WiFi feature, but not everyone is able to do that)

Also, today, I was about an hour outside of Beijing, and NO GPRS... none at all, just voice and sms, but no data connections until we were just outside of Shunyi.

Two versions would be messy for everyone, there should just be two ways to get the data - either via WiFi or Apps Store or Your Website then Desktop and Sync.

Do you think that is possible? Otherwise it would be a huge handicap for those of us who live in China (and I think that might be a decent percentage of your clients?)

BTW - I will buy my iPhone once Pleco is released, and I will buy it in HK, so it will have WiFi, and I can connect it to my wireless router at home... but I am thinking that not everyone is able to do things like this. So this isn't just in self interest, it is in genuine concern over this. Although the self interest part would be that sooo many sites get blocked here and overseas access is sooo slow I would really worry about time outs and failed downloads. So no matter what hardware I have, I will still have to contend with that issue (although on my home computer I have a VPN to avoid those issues, and could download much easier).

 

[gato]

I forgot to add, the iPhone in China is 99% likely NOT to have WiFi... (many will of course buy in HK to get the WiFi feature, but not everyone is able to do that)

That's probably not a big deal as I hear that foreigners aren't eligible for a long-term contract that's required for the China version of the iPhone, anyway.

Foreigners who want to buy an iPhone in China can still buy the (illegally) imported version that is sold in most major cities which does have WiFi enabled.

 

[isaachou]

wow, the color thing is awesome. i saw the screen shots on the front page are also in color, is that a 2.1 thing? or am i just dumb and can't figure out how to activate it? i have a x50v running wm2003se. just upgraded to 2.0.3.

isaac

 

[Magnus]

What a teaser!
I certainly hope that we all can have this before christmas this year.

 

[radioman]

Maybe I wasn't paying attention, but will Pleco be integrated on any level with SMS or will it be a cut and paste exercise for now? Just curious...

Hi Mike,

Thanks for releasing the videos. I'm not disappointed - I will be amazingly happy when I can use this, and the document feature is going to be so useful. Right now, when I want to read a Chinese SMS with characters I don't know, I have to get to my Mac and use PhoneView to extract it and paste it into Wenlin. Just one more reason to be excited about this app.

Hope the beta testers don't find many bugs so this gets out the door ASAP.

 

[mikelove]

dhe - we're not planning a suggestion feature like that, no; we'd rather keep all of the choices available in case you pick the wrong one (or aren't exactly sure which character is correct, e.g. with 己/已/巳), and I don't quite see the point of making suggestions like that for a dictionary search anyway - better to just search for that first character and then see all of the words beginning with it. If the character is the start of a lot of words it's unlikely we'd guess the correct one anyway, and if it's the start of only a few words then the word you want should be right there in the dictionary results without your having to scroll a lot. Also, I'm not quite sure which characters we'd want to put in there anyway - do we take the most common words with that first character? But those are the words that people are most likely to already know - for an intermediate / advanced learner you'd almost rather pick some less common characters, but how uncommon should they be?

coljac - thanks!

crj - there's no way to install arbitrary data files to an iPhone, that's the problem - you have to either download them directly from the phone or have them be part of the initial application bundle. So we're stuck choosing between a) a small, efficient, fast application that requires a WiFi connection to download add-on data files, or b) a big, bloated, difficult-to-update application that has all of its add-ons built-in. Our download manager supports multiple mirror servers and lets you switch between then mid-download (along with pause / resume / etc), so you'd be able to get data files from Hong Kong or elsewhere just like you can with our current software.

I suppose we could compromise by building in a few not-too-large / likely-to-be-widely-purchased add-ons, like stroke order and a couple of dictionaries, but make the 200 MB extended audio files download-only. But if the iPhone in China does turn out to include WiFi we'll probably just release the small version initially and consider releasing an alternate one or adding some add-on data files into the main application in a later release.

issachou - you can enable that through the Misc panel of Preferences, http://www.pleco.com/manual/preferences.html#misc - it's off by default in the Palm / WM versions but we're leaning towards turning it on by default on iPhone.

Magnus - so do I

radioman - it's just cut and paste; Apple hasn't provided an interface for applications to read data from the SMS database yet. (nor do I expect them to - it's the sort of thing they'd likely consider a security risk)

 

[numble]

Are there options for saving word lists (and a corresponding "export word list" feature)?

 

[mikelove]

Nope, that's coming with the flashcard-equipped version. (and yes, I know that there are half a dozen other iPhone Chinese dictionaries that have that feature, but it seems silly to go to the trouble of developing one for Pleco when full-fledged flashcards aren't too far away)

 

[crj]

Hi Mike, thanks so much for the clarifications.

"crj - there's no way to install arbitrary data files to an iPhone, that's the problem - you have to either download them directly from the phone or have them be part of the initial application bundle. So we're stuck choosing between a) a small, efficient, fast application that requires a WiFi connection to download add-on data files, or b) a big, bloated, difficult-to-update application that has all of its add-ons built-in. Our download manager supports multiple mirror servers and lets you switch between then mid-download (along with pause / resume / etc), so you'd be able to get data files from Hong Kong or elsewhere just like you can with our current software.

I suppose we could compromise by building in a few not-too-large / likely-to-be-widely-purchased add-ons, like stroke order and a couple of dictionaries, but make the 200 MB extended audio files download-only. But if the iPhone in China does turn out to include WiFi we'll probably just release the small version initially and consider releasing an alternate one or adding some add-on data files into the main application in a later release."



It sounds like the WiFi is the only way to go, and with mirror servers in HK it should be fine. It will just be important to clarify that on the Apps Store page, so people know that WiFi is a requirement.

Just out of curiosity then, when flashcards come out, how will it be possible to share flashcards with other users? Or upload personal ones from Excel/Txt? That is a key feature I rely upon. A big aspect of what makes Pleco 'better' is the fabulous online user community that shares flashcards, text files, etc... Or are those fine to add since they are just 'files' and not part of the program?

Thanks again Mike, and sorry to hassle you... As you can see, for me the only thing exciting about iPhone is Pleco, so I don't know much about how it works yet... heehee and after seeing the demo, there is no way I could pass up the chance to use Pleco on iPhone, it is practically like a new product

 

[mikelove]

Oh yes, the need for WiFi will be right up there front and center - first line of the description in capital letters I think.

Flashcard sharing will work in a couple of different ways, but all of them needing some sort of internet connection on your phone unfortunately - in the current version you can download document files from the web or upload them from your PC (basically your iPhone turns into a mini web server, you just enter its address in your PC's web browser and there's an upload prompt in there), for the flashcard-equipped version we're also planning something hosted on our server (so there's less of a potential issue with firewalls) and possibly also some sort of desktop sync solution. There's literally no way to get user-generated data onto a non-jailbroken iPhone other than over the internet, so that's not something we have much chance of working around unless and until Apple adds a shared documents directory (which I was really hoping they'd do with OS 3.0, but sadly no - perhaps next summer's OS update will include one).

 

[ldolse]

As long as you're going in the direction of requiring internet access, have you thought about tying in Chinesepod flashcard support directly from Pleco? Seems like it would be pretty sweet to plug in your Chinesepod user/pass and download flashcard updates directly. Now that they are actually exporting native Pleco format it seems like this could be done fairly easily.

 

[Jwloft]

Re: iPhone app file size??

Sorry if this question has been answered already -- I'm new to this board and haven't read all the previous posts.

I'm wondering how much space this app will eat up and, more importantly, how much space will need to be available to run it.

This looks great and if possible (and as long as pricing is reasonable), I'm going to clear space on my 3G for this app. Hope it can fit.

Also, any update on ship date? I see some talk about August, but obviously that's not going to happen. Is this in Apple's hands now? What's the status?

Thanks for the great work -- I'm thrilled by the potential I see in this app.

 

[mikelove]

ldolse - well we'd still need some integration on their end to make it work well, or at least a mobile version of the ChinesePod site - you can sort-of read ChinesePod transcripts with the built-in web browser even in the initial release, but it's kind of slow / awkward / crash-prone owing to how memory-intensive their website is.

Jwloft - that varies widely depending on which / how many add-ons you install. The basic software only clocks in at about 27 MB in our current builds at least, but that only gives you one C-E and one E-C dictionary, no audio, and no stroke order. Stroke order on iPhone is about 3 MB, dictionaries can range from 2 MB (C&T, Tuttle) to 50 MB (21st Century), audio's 200-250 MB though we're debating having a smaller version of that.

Pricing should be very reasonable, ship-wise we're not in Apple's hands yet (only releasing to beta-testers later this week).

 

[enimeni]

As many other said before, those videos are really looking great! I can't wait to install pleco on my iphone. Before my Centro died 4 month ago I used Pleco really every day for my Chinese studies. Btw. I'm hoping too there will be a friendly upgrade policy for old customers of Pleco! ;-)

 

[mikelove]

We're hoping that too, though that part of this really is in Apple's hands.

 

[mikelove]

Clarification on my earlier comment about word lists - while there isn't a system to let you categorize / rearrange / etc words in those as on Palm/WM, we do have a rudimentary feature in place that lets you dump dictionary entries to text files in Pleco flashcard format (with the option to automatically create a new file or add a category tag for each new day of additions) - you can then email those to yourself to import into the Palm / WM version of Pleco, or keep them on your iPhone to import into the flashcard system on that once it's available.

 

[benzhen]

hey mike quick questions/suggestions

document reader: i would really like to see scroll arrows (up and down) on the bottom there for quick page scrolling rather than have to thumb through everything. this is much more convenient when reading large files.

also there is there new iphone file browser (http://www.iphone-explorer.com/) that works on non-jailbroken phones. and it works in conjunction with some apps including good reader. basically you load files into the DCIM folder and good reader copies them (or uses directly from there haven't actually tried) into the app directory. this way you can drag n drop files directly from finder/windows explorer. and if its jailbroken you can go right to the app directory and drag n drop.

i'll save any other judgments for the actual beta test....THANKS!!!

 

[mikelove]

benzhen - thanks! Scroll arrow buttons are already added - both them and the button to show / hide the slider control are optional.

Interesting idea about iPhone Explorer, but I'm a bit worried Apple might put the kibosh on it by removing whatever hack they used to get into the iPhone's directory structure in a future release. So I wouldn't want to rely on it for too much.

 

[benzhen]

i'm not sure it's a hack because without the jailbreak you can only see a very limited amount of directories. i think that's why it has you put the files in the DCIM folder since that is accessible anyway (like when you plug in your iphone, iphoto pops up and reads it as a digital camera). but i don't really know the details.