iPod Touch / iPhone

Will the iPhone version that is in development also work with the iPod Touch when it is released?

I'm not leaving for China until August. Is there even a chance it will be out by then? Or should I just go ahead and buy an iPaq 110? I'm just looking for some help in what I should buy.

If you can't tell me a release date, at least tell me if there is or isn't a chance that it will be available for the iPod Touch before August.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Yes, it should work with the iPod Touch too, unless Apple does something weird with firmware upgrades that breaks compatibility. As far as the odds of it being out by August, I really can't say much about that yet - certainly it might be out by then but it also might not be. So I wouldn't advise you to buy an iPod Touch expecting to be able to take it to China in August with Pleco on it, but I also wouldn't advise you to buy an iPAQ 110 on the assumption that Pleco won't be ready - only get the 110 if you need to buy a new device right now and need it to be guaranteed to be able to run Pleco in August.
 
Thanks for the reply! It will be interesting to see what comes out between now and this Summer. I think I'll wait for the iPhone/iPod Touch version to buy Pleco. As much as I want Pleco for going to China, I think I can survive without it when I first arrive in August if Pleco isn't ready yet for the iPod Touch.

A lot of people want that version, so I hope that motivates you to "git 'er done"!!!
 

mfcb

状元
nihao pengyou ;)
i cant say anything about release dates of pleco and/or hardware suggestions for you (although i must confess that i am not really an iPhone fanatic), but from a "chinese learners" and "pleco user" view i want inform you, that in my opinion its a huge mistake to wait half a year, before you start effectively learning chinese...
i made a similar mistake, and now i really consider the time before pleco as "me not learning chinese" that time. since i used pleco, my motivation to learn, my progress and my determination got an incredible boost...
although i still consider myself as a beginner (due to my speaking ability, hehe, pleco does not help me with that...) i am sure that my reading ability amazes a lot of chinese people, and i use pleco just exactly 1 year now... so, imagine what you could learn in half a year, my first half year of learning chinese was a lost one without pleco (although i had a lot of other tools, on my PC)...

that said, i have to return to reviewing my 1200 words for today :p
 
Hi MFCB,

Thanks for the response. Currently, I mainly use ChinesePod to study Mandarin. I also have some flashcards from Tuttle and other textbooks and things. I've been lazy on the flashcards, though. I've also been known to practice speaking with lots of random Chinese people that I meet here in the U.S. I've got plenty to study. I just really like this software from the reviews I've read and the screenshots. I think people studying a language also just like to buy new things to keep studying the language fresh and fun. I think the coolest part about Pleco is being able to write an unknown character on the screen to look it up. Last time I was in China I was frantically looking through a pocket dictionary each time I didn't know how to say a word. I was often too lazy to lookup a character in that book. This time will be much better with Pleco, I'm sure. I could easily see myself using the software to understand characters on a menu without pictures.

I have an Apple computer, and I guess that's why I'd rather use Pleco on an iPod Touch. I've been watching the iPaq 110/111 closely on eBay the last couple of months. The price keeps getting lower. I can only imagine what the price will be as it gets closer to summer. Perhaps there will also be an iPod Touch update by then, too. I know I'll like using Pleco on an iPod Touch. For one, I will be able to easily sync things up between my computer and the iPod Touch. I'm not sure how well an iPaq would work with an Apple Computer. I just worry a little about how easily it will be to input characters on the iPod Touch screen without a stylus (but I addressed that question in another post).
 

gato

状元
I've been lazy on the flashcards, though. I've also been known to practice speaking with lots of random Chinese people that I meet here in the U.S. I've got plenty to study.
The most helpful part of Pleco for me is actually its flashcard feature. By having Pleco around, you can study your flashcards on the go whenever you have a little bit of dead time (like when you are sitting on the toilet :mrgreen: ). You'll be amazed how quickly you can go through your flashcards.
 

mfcb

状元
gato said:
The most helpful part of Pleco for me is actually its flashcard feature. By having Pleco around, you can study your flashcards on the go whenever you have a little bit of dead time (like when you are sitting on the toilet :mrgreen: ). You'll be amazed how quickly you can go through your flashcards.
exactly what i mean ;) and even it takes me 10 minutes more to go to work by public bus, i prefer it over the car, as i can use the whole 30 minutes for reviewing...
nihao pengyou said:
I mainly use ChinesePod to study Mandarin.
i also started with ChinesePod, and i listened to the first 50 or so beginners lessons over and over again, but i was not able to remember much of the vocab for a longer time until i started to put it into pleco flashcards (and therefore also had to learn the characters, not just the approximate sound :roll: )

being able to draw characters from time to time is certainly helpful, but i also found it easy to learn 五笔 input method, which was available on my nokia that i bough in china... i had success with about 80% of the characters i tried, and amazingly the ch-en dict on the nokia also knew most of them ;)
as my pda was not a phone at that time i did not take pleco with me all the time (too big and afraid of losing it under the influence of Mr. Qingdao). now i have a HTC touch pro, and i bought it specifically because of the physical keyboard, that i really missed on each of the PDA's i had so far. its a major advantage for me that 3 to 4 devices (phone + pleco + gps (+camera)) are now combined in one device.

i can understand, that many people like the iPhone, its handling and usability is very nice, but being a software developer myself (although in a different field) i hate the idea of having a device i cant make programs for...
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
nihao pengyou - another option you could consider would be to buy a really cheap used Palm on eBay along with a discounted copy of 1.0. The pricing for iPhone switches/upgrades might work out so that you'd pretty much be paying for a brand new copy once you switched to iPhone (though hopefully it won't be quite that bad), but you'd have the use of the software in the meantime and without having to invest much in hardware at least. And the flashcards should certainly transfer over, I can't think of any reason why Apple would stop us from letting people transfer / import their old flashcard lists.

Fingertip input on the iPhone really does seem to work well, though - I've held off on posting a demo video since some features might end up getting removed (and I'm a bit worried about other people ripping off some of our design ideas, many of which would not be difficult to implement programming-wise), but I've literally written characters as complicated as 龘 (yes, the 48-stroke Traditional version) and had the correct match come up as the first result - it's vastly more accurate than the iPhone's built-in system.

mfcb - you can make programs for iPhone, you just have to pay Apple $100/year and can only distribute them to 200 people without getting them approved on iTunes. (so not ideal, I agree) Physical keyboards are really nice, though - along with opening up development I'm hoping the pre might motivate Apple to release a device with a slide-out keyboard, I spend a lot more time typing on my iPhone than I do watching videos so screen size is less important to me than easy text input (though I do hope they stick with 320x480 resolution, even with a physically smaller display, rather than forcing developers to support lots of different ones).
 
Hi Mike,

If I buy an iPaq and Pleco 2.0 now, will I need to spend money on a new license to use Pleco on an iPod Touch when that version is ready? Or, will my license for Pleco 2.0 be good for both versions? I'm just not sure how it will work out.

Thanks for the feedback guys. I could definitely use Pleco for some flashcard studying.

:arrow: One question...How do you get your vocabulary words from Chinesepod to work on Pleco? Maybe there's already a thread on this. I'm not sure.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
See this thread for a discussion of ChinesePod compatibility.

We don't know what the upgrade policy for the the iPhone / iPod Touch version is going to be like yet, basically because until Apple actually approves / posts our finished software to iTunes we don't know exactly how permissive they're going to be as far as which dictionaries / add-ons / etc we can distribute through our own site and which have to be sold through iTunes. Anything that's sold through iTunes can't be offered as a free upgrade, since there's no mechanism in iTunes for giving your software away for free to a particular group of customers without giving it to everyone - they offer a limited facility to generate "promotional codes," but there's a maximum of 50 of those per application so that wouldn't help for this (particularly not since we'd already be using most of them for review copies and such). There are also some licensing-related complications to the iPhone switch that again are going to depend a lot on Apple's approval process and how much of the licensing / sales end of things can be handled outside of iTunes.
 

ssaito

探花
Mike,

I switched from WinMobile to iPhone recently, so had to give up Pleco 2.0 - luckily I kept an old Zire around so I can use my 2.0 palm license on that device.

I tried several of the free chinese-english dictionaries in the app store, and they are clumsy, but work. You are right that the built in hand writing recognition software is poor compared to Pleco's. Do you know why that is? Wasn't Apple rumored to have bought/invested in one of the local Chinese companies that wrote a hand-writing recognition software app?

Will you need to re-write much, or is there a fairly easy way to translate to objective-C? (come to think of it, I don't even know what pleco is written in)

Looking fwd to the iphone edition.

Steve
 

ipsi

状元
From what Mike's said elsewhere, Pleco is written in C++ (with maybe some C). He's also mentioned that the back-end code is translating relatively well to Objective-C, but that was a while ago, and I've obviously got no idea if that still holds true.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Pleco's written in C++, but we actually only use C++ classes for the platform-specific UI code - the cross-platform stuff is all basically in straight C. Which means that it compiles in Objective-C without really any modifications at all - Objective-C is really just a different way of adding object-orientedness to C, so most C programs will compile quite happily in an Objective-C or a C++ environment with minimal changes.

The biggest issue we've had actually is figuring out ways to translate some of our interface designs from the stylus-driven Palm/WM world to the finger-driven iPhone one - handwriting didn't turn out to be much of a problem, but we had to make a lot of changes to the main dictionary interface to get it to work. And of course every time we make a change we have to carefully think about if there's anything people might have liked to do with the old interface that they'll no longer be able to do (or do as well) with the new one - there are necessarily going to be some compromises, and a few people may find those problematic enough that they'll decide to stick with the Palm/WM version, but hopefully most people will find the new design intuitive and useful. And we've been able to streamline the software in a lot of areas - there's now just one interface for handwriting/radical input, for example, instead of the three different ones (four if you include the legacy 1.0-style screen option) in 2.0 on Palm/WM.

I'm not sure where Apple got their handwriting recognizer from, but head-to-head testing against the Hanwang recognizer confirms that they're definitely not using that. Every engine has kind of a unique "signature" in the way they handle certain special cases - 己/已/巳 for example is something they've pretty much all had to explicitly deal with, Hanwang's engine seems to distinguish 已 from 巳 by how far that line goes (if it's more than about 3/4 of the way to the top it'll usually mark it as 巳), while the built-in engine in the iPhone seems to always return 已 unless the line is actually touching / crossing the top. Also, the Hanwang engine isn't designed to recognize partially-completed characters, while the iPhone one is - if you've finished all but one stroke in 我, Hanwang likely won't list it anywhere in the potential matches, while on the iPhone it comes right up. This may help to explain why the iPhone is less accurate; since it's matching incomplete as well as completed characters there are a lot more opportunities for false positives.
 
皇帝,新年快樂!

Do you have any interest in signing up names for willing debuggers, once the iPhone/iPod version is ready for testing?

All my Palms have died or stolen ... therefore I've been Pleco-less for about a year now ... it's funny how much lazier I've become re: using/practicing Chinese. CE-DICT just ain't cutting it.

Anyways, best of luck, can't wait to see demos when you're ready!
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
I'm not sure we're going to do an external beta-test at all, actually - there's not really much of a technical need for it (grand total of 4 iPhone / iPod Touch models ever released, and we don't need to test with lots of firmware versions because we're not planning to support anything before 2.2 anyway), we don't have to worry about program conflicts because those are almost impossible unless you're running a bunch of weird jailbreak hacks (in which case you're probably on your own, or at least we're not going to worry about you until after the initial release is out), and the tricky engine code is already being tested through the Palm / WM versions - the 2.0.1 betas have incorporated a couple of invisible under-the-hood changes we're making for the sake of iPhone.

If we do do an external iPhone / iPod Touch beta-test we'll certainly send out an announcement e-mail about it, though I'm not sure how we'd decide how to assign the limited amount of spots - fairest thing would probably be to give first priority to anyone who submitted a significant amount of feedback on the WM/Palm 2.0 betas (since we know they're actually going to send bug reports) and distribute the remaining slots through a lottery of some kind. Maybe we'd do a charity auction on eBay for a few beta-test slots, that might actually raise a decent amount of money given how much interest this is getting :)
 

macman

Member
Mike,

Here is an possible idea for your future distribution of Pleco for the iPhone/iTouch. If you have already considered it, please disregard this posting.

In the medical world, the heavy weight program, premium Epocrates Essentials was recently released for the iPhone/iTouch. They earlier released the free, basic Epocrates program for download through the App Store. To get this app onto your iPhone/iTouch device, you download a small free app from Apple that than requires you to obtain the complete app only via the programs free WiFi "Updates" function. As medical drug data needs to be frequently updated, the WiFi "Updates" function is extremely practical. What is neat, however, is that they seemed to have leveraged this feature in order to sell their premium "Epocrates Essentials" app through their own web site.

Basically, you have to go to their website (epocrates.com) and pay a subscription fee of $149/yr or $249/2 yrs. After you pay this, your account is credited and you will be able to get the full premium program through your next WiFi "Updates". I wonder if you might be able to use such a model so that you will have greater flexibility for controlling your sales and distribution of various dictionaries, updates, and for collecting more favorable payment through your own website rather than Apple's App store?

Epocrates is a truly high quality app from a top notch medical software company. I'm sure they've worked out this model with Apple, and unless they have some special arrangements, I wonder if you may find their model advantageous to Pleco's future on this platform.

Ed
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Thanks - didn't realize that ePocrates was using that strategy, though I've seen a few other companies doing similarly - eBook readers and the like. We've been thinking of a number of ways we might be able to distribute parts of Pleco outside of iTunes, though given Apple's somewhat-capricious approval policies it's not really going to be clear what we'll actually be allowed to do until the software is actually finished and available for sale.
 

macman

Member
ePocrates was one of the featured apps by Apple when they were rolling out their initial SDK, so they probably get special treatment for being first and for being a leader in the medical software niche for handheld devices. I would think that Pleco's leadership in the Chinese language software niche for handheld devices would also afford you leverage with Apple. If Apple is to do well in the future with the iPhone/iTouch in China or in the growing world-wide market of Chinese language students, they really need excellent language software and yours is hands down the best. I certainly think that it would be reasonable to aim for equal treatment on distribution terms as ePocrates.

I know that your users are generally loyal enthusiasts, so if you need help from users to lobby Apple on your behalf (e.g. a petition drive of sorts), don't be shy to ask. I wish you the best as you complete development and work out your distribution plans.

Ed
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Hopefully it won't be considered too dramatic a sort of special treatment - there are a lot of business models that would be almost impossible without the ability to sell software enhancements outside of iTunes (particularly given the lack of any mechanism for buying extra content / add-ons through iTunes) so Apple would really be shooting themselves in the foot if they limited it to just a few developers.

But we're certainly worried about the possibility that between add-on distribution / an independent Chinese handwriting recognizer / a UI that's more complicated than the average iPhone application Pleco might end up in "under review" limbo for a few months, so we may consider enlisting people's help in that case - writing Apple directly might just irritate them, but if we were able to, say, get some internet buzz going through a combination of review copies / screenshots / etc, that seems like might have a chance of attracting their attention enough to get us approved a little faster.
 

Jim

榜眼
There are a lot of well known gadget web sites and blogs. It might be a good idea to submit reviews of Pleco to them or in the case of blogs get them to link to some good reviews. Some of them might even have staff that have studied Chinese and could write a review themselves. Reviews that mention people telling their classmates about Pleco and most of them rushing out to buy a Pleco compatible device should have good impact as would mentioning being unwilling to buy a non-Pleco compatible device. Links in blogs should have a nice little blurb that gets people to hit the link. I will quite often check out things I don't intend to buy just because the blog made me interested in what they are doing and how they are doing it.

Having a number of good reviews across a wide range of well known sites that you could refer Apple to when submitting Pleco to the App Store as well as some stats on the number of people studying Chinese worldwide would give them some impetus to approve it quickly. A brief history of Plecodict with stats on the steady growth in sales would also help.

Now would be a good time to start getting some reviews out there. I am sure many of the current Pleco owners would be glad to help out writing reviews. You could even have a small contest with the five or ten best reviews from a marketing perspective winning some sort of small prize even if that is merely mention in the Pleco forums; bragging rights are often of surprisingly high value. Even if it makes no difference with Apple it should help sales overall.
 
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