iPod Touch / iPhone

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Well it's tough to get anyone interested in Palm OS or Windows Mobile software now, so I think this would more take the form of offering previews of the iPhone version to some of these sites after (or shortly before) we submitted it and hoping that might attract some interest - there are a couple of things which as far as we know are unique not only among iPhone Chinese dictionaries but iPhone software in general so that might get a look from some non-China-specific sites.
 

macman

Member
I understand that Apple restricts the distribution of "free apps" that are essentially crippleware. By this understanding, the current demo version of Pleco would be prohibited from being distributed as a "free app". It also seems to me that a huge portion of the cost of this software is the license fees that must be paid to the content owners of each dictionary.

How about harvesting the power of open source to create your own content (i.e. E-->C and C-->E dictionary) and including it as the dictionary that comes with the Pleco free app? Perhaps you could limit the dictionary to just the HSK Level 1 words/characters list, or perhaps some other most frequent word/character list. I would think that the HSK Level 1 data is freely available so that you only need to get open source contributors to come up with simple and useful example sentences to be included with dictionary entries. As your potential contributors likely already own your product, you may want to consider giving significant contributors a free crossgrade as an incentive. If this idea takes off, you may go in the direction of including frequently used collocations, 成语, or, just simply, more commonly used words/characters. As a side note,I would love to see a notation with each definition representing if the word is (or to what degree) 口语, 书面语, 专业词, 古代词, 地方语...

I understand that being a dictionary content provider is not your focus (writing great software is), but perhaps you can utilize the skills of many to help you in creating such content and then distribute it for free in keeping with the spirit of open source and yet maintaining control over its use. To me the advantage is two fold: 1) to get a great "App Store" Pleco free app out there to distinguish it from the huge amount of junk that is also labeled as free apps (following the model of the ePocrates); 2) to provide unique dictionary content that is not available elsewhere. Both can achieve the goal of creating buzz, and if successful a dynamic community of Chinese learners that feel like they are part of creating a great, new dictionary that suits our mutual needs. To me one of the greatest strengths of Apple, both through its darkest days when Steve Jobs left the company and its current heydays, is its dynamic community of users. It is the community that carries the platform to great heights, and I'd likewise love to see such a Pleco community grow.

Ed
 
Don't know... A free application with a tiny dictionary will be compared with the free dictionaries with the CEDICT and can generate a ton of negative comments... A more sensible approach would be a free dictionary with CEDICT minus the flash-card module or a flash-card module without the dictionary module. A serious chinese like Pleco is more geared towards the serious learner of chinese.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
macman - thanks for the suggestion, but actually we've already laid the groundwork with a couple of publishers for unlimited (no per-copy-fee) licenses - originally for a potential web-based version of Pleco, but they happen to be usable for this too - so we should be able to include a nice, big licensed dictionary in a free iPhone version thanks to that. (one that we haven't even announced that we've licensed at all yet, actually, which is why it isn't in the Palm / WM demo versions) This isn't true for all of our licenses, of course, but we can get enough content that way to put together something usable.

Though it's an interesting question how much we want to give away - it seems like we could probably create a free Chinese dictionary that would equal or better pretty much all of the other ones (both free and paid) that are out there now while still holding back most of the really cool features / content / etc for the paid version. And since the free version wouldn't cost us any royalties, server bandwidth or tech support time, we're better off (or at least no worse off) with someone downloading / using our free dictionary than someone else's, even if they don't upgrade to the paid version. But giving away too much could both cannibalize paid-version sales and anger people who paid for Pleco on Palm / WM only for the sake of features which are now available for free on iPhone, so we have to tread carefully here.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Well yeah, but not as big as the ABC - more like CC-CEDICT size-wise. So useful more on the basis of its licensing flexibility and slightly different definitions than for any massive expansion of Pleco's vocabulary coverage. (this is one of the three new dictionaries I mentioned earlier, the other two being Wiseman and ???????)
 

ste5en

秀才
I really liked Plecodict on my Win Mobile 6.2 pro phone. I ignored iPhone specifically because you had not yet released Pleco for iPhone. But after buying an iPod touch, then seeing it's vastly superior usability and functionality for mobile apps compared to Mobile 6, I had to buy an iPhone, and it has changed my life. The ONLY disadvantage is that I'm stuck without Pleco. The Chinese apps available for iPhone are minimal, and iPhone really needs Pleco.

A tip for your iPhone development. Most iPhone apps have minimal options/choices. This frustrated me at first, until i realized that the fewer features enhanced the usability for certain applications. I can give you examples if you want. Net net, a Pleco app for iphone - even with far fewer features than the Mobile 6 version - would be far superior to anything offered by Chinese language software currently available for iPhone. I would recommend you hurry to get out a simple version for iPhone, and perhaps charging more for later versions with more features.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Oh, we're definitely leaving some features out of the iPhone version - I mentioned earlier the possibility that the first iPhone release might not include flashcards, and that's still looking like a good idea as it'll cut development time roughly in half; flashcards require not only the work of designing / implementing the user interface but also require us to tackle the tricky problem of how to get people's flashcard data on to / off of their iPhones, and it'd be lovely to be able to punt that to a later release.

An added bonus is that by the time we did release a flashcard version we'd hopefully have most of the 2.1 design / usability improvements completed, so the eventual iPhone flashcard system would be considerably more user-friendly and accessible than the current Palm / WM one and people who first started using Pleco on iPhone would be able to avoid the steep learning curve of the current flashcard system.
 

ste5en

秀才
Why don't you just sell flashcard sets, and give users the ability to carve them up into smaller sets? This modularity seems to be common in iPhone apps.

Steve
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Won't do for our users - people are going to want to move their carefully-constructed flashcard sets from Palm / WM over to the iPhone version, and we've got lots of people who use custom vocabulary lists / obscure textbooks / etc and wouldn't be satisfied by a modest selection of premade lists. There's also the question of backing up / moving around people's study history, category assignments, etc - getting custom flashcard data off of iPhones is almost as important as getting it on to them. There are a bunch of other flashcard apps on iPhone, and several of them even offer free premade Chinese vocabulary lists, so we have to do more than that in order to offer something that's worth getting over a generic flashcard app - it's much easier for us to distinguish ourselves in the dictionary part of the market than the flashcard part of it.
 

gato

状元
The Chinese press is reporting a rumor that the iPhone will debut in China with China Unicom in May. There was a recent report that talks between Apple and China Mobile broke down due to China Mobile insistence on controlling the sale of apps in China....

After the recent telecom reorganization, each of the three major mobile carriers has been given a different 3G license: WCDMA for China Unicom, CDMA2000 for China Telecom, and the home-grown TD-SCDMA standard for China Mobile, the largest current carrier (as a way to support TD-SCDMA). Since the iPhone 3G uses WCDMA, it does make more sense for Apple to go with Unicom.

http://www.macblogz.com/2009/02/09/appl ... na-unicom/
Rumor: Apple’s iPhone Hitting Chinese Markets on May 19th with China Unicom
Posted by Aviv on February 9, 2009 at 9:01 pm PST

http://www.dfdaily.com/node2/node135/us ... 2078.shtml
核心提示:据说,今年5月17日的电信日,Iphone将与新联通缔结婚约,正式嫁入中国。观察家认为,Iphone在登陆大陆市场的一年内就可以占据中国高端智能手机的三分之一以上的市场份额,甚至半壁江山。这对在中国高端手机市场上横行霸道的诺基亚、三星、摩托罗拉来说,无疑是一场挥之不去的梦魇。
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Heh, reading the leaks about discussions with China Mobile I was just thinking "why not Unicom?" and then there they go - makes a lot of sense, the 神州行 set likely weren't going to be going through official channels for their iPhones anyway so China Mobile's market share advantage wouldn't be nearly as significant. Though May 19th seems a bit early, they really need to make some improvements in the iPhone's out-of-the-box Chinese input capabilities if they want to conquer that market - I'd have thought they might want to wait for iPhone OS 3.0, can't be that far away now anyway.
 
Yeah. Doesn't seem like that much of a surprise. And, I agree, the out-of-the-box Chinese input methods, while they work, are not that well polished. Both for the pinyin IME and the character IME, after selecting/writing in my first character, often, but not always, the suggested/predicted next characters are not the most commonly used. So, I still have to write in the second character for many very common two character words.
 

character

状元
I guess we've gone completely away from discussing Android, so moving my response here...
mikelove said:
As far as the business end of it, however, the fact that a lot of people would no longer be buying a device specifically to run Pleco changes the math of price decreases considerably.
To be specific, I think people are choosing which phone to buy based on Pleco, though I'm sure there are rare cases where someone buys a PDA just for Pleco.

But it's not clear how big, which is the nice thing about releasing the iPhone version in stages (no flashcards in the first release, etc) [...]
I would hesitate to do that, given the competition already on the app store: http://xiaocidian.com/xiaocidian-iphone/ I don't know what he charges, but I would guess it's less than you can afford to.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
That one's $2.99, but it's one of something like a dozen nearly-identical CC-CEDICT based dictionaries for iPhone, ranging in price from free to $15. And the price really seems to have little correlation with the features - one of the free ones has better Pinyin search than even the $15 one, for example. (since these are nominally competitors I'd rather not mention any names here)

Our main initial selling points are higher-quality content, faster / better searches thanks to our proprietary database engine, and some cool unique features like fullscreen handwriting recognition - those should be present from the very first iPhone release even if we're taking our time about adding flashcards.
 

gato

状元
Amazon to Sell E-Books for iPod Touch / iPhone

Too bad Kindle doesn't support Chinese, yet.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/techn ... ml?_r=1&hp
Amazon to Sell E-Books for Apple Devices
By BRAD STONE
Published: March 4, 2009

Shaking up the nascent market for electronic books for the second time in two months, Amazon.com will begin selling e-books for reading on Apple’s popular iPhone and iPod Touch.

The iPhone Kindle app is free on iTune.
http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-am ... phone-app/

Maybe you can try it out with some free Kindle books first (though the attraction of Kindle on the iPhone is for new books)
http://kindle.sinshoppe.com/popular.html
 

ciaocibai

进士
Hey Mike,

Just want to say 1) The flashcards are one of the killer uses of Pleco, but 2) if it meant we could use pleco sooner, I really hope you release a scaled back version first. Why is making the flashcards so time consuming though? I would have thought that would be quite a straight forward part! Is that because of the importing/exporting from other versions of pleco?

I remember when they were developing the iPhone/iPod Touch there was a lot of talk about the similarites between OSX and the OS on the portable devices. Is that really the case? Would it help you in development for a mac desktop app? I'm not sure how much crossover there is, but would love a mac app too! Hehe. Do you use Windows or Mac OS yourself?

Keep up the good work!

Cheers.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Flashcards are time-consuming for a couple of reasons: they have a ton of UI (28 different configuration dialogs, plus the highly-elaborate screen for the actual test), they're extremely resource-intensive (though this isn't quite as much of a problem on iPhone where SQLite is built-in and used practically everywhere), and they involve large amounts of user-generated data which people need to be able to regularly and easily back up / import / export.

On iPhone the user data situation is particularly complicated: there's no way for people to independently read / write data files to their devices, so we have to develop our own proprietary system for that. A number of other programs allow PC synchronization over home networks via Rendezvous, but that's not really reliable enough for our purposes (particularly given how many Pleco users are "in the field" and wouldn't have access to a nice friendly home WiFi router they could do it with), so we pretty much have to do it through a centralized server and that takes a whole lot of work to set up.

Also, to be honest I'm really not satisfied with the way flashcards turned out in 2.0, particularly not on the UI end of things, so I'd really like to put those through a couple more revisions before they make their debut on iPhone - simpler configuration dialogs, better / more intuitive tools for organizing cards, a more flexible scoring system, etc; the extra time won't just be going to implementing flashcards on iPhone, it'll also go to improving them on WM.

And yes, iPhone development will indeed help us make a Mac desktop app, which is now very much a part of our future plans - we've been sitting on the necessary licenses for years now and it's high time we stopped getting distracted and pushed forward with at least a modest desktop release of Pleco. (actually we have more to bring to Mac than Windows in some respects - I don't believe Hanwang actually distributes their wonderful handwriting recognition software on Mac, but we've got a Mac version of the recognizer library now)
 

ciaocibai

进士
Thanks for the reply, it's really cool to know there is an active developer on the case! I've been hunting around for some good software for the iPod touch, but most of the offerings out there really are pretty crap. I guess we just have to wait a little longer :wink:

On the positive side for you though, if all this talk about China Unicom and iPhones comes true, I guess that improves your potential market quite a lot. I'm still dreaming of a desktop client to go with it (easier for flashcards too, haha) - I've hedged my bets as I have both a windows and mac laptop with me in China, so either way would work for that...

Keep up the good work, and please let us know how it's going! It sounds like you have lots of really cool ideas though, just can't wait to see the finished product! :)
 
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