Official iPad Thread

[kohoutek]

Licenses transferred over from Palm/WM are subject to the same one-device-at-a-time rule they were on those, so you're certainly welcome to deactivate your license on your iPhone and move it over to your iPad, but you can't have it active on both at the same time. Not much we can do about this since it's stipulated in several of the copyright licenses we've signed

Ok... this is certainly not aimed at you Mike or Pleco, since I'm totally clear on the fact that you have no control over this... But that is seriously lame. 100 bucks for a dictionary/flashcard system (that I love)... but I have to buy it all over again just to have it fully usable on the two devices I carry. I guess that's just how it goes with technology constantly upgrading. But really. Lame.

Don't get me wrong, I am truly appreciative to have been able to at least upgrade it to one of those devices from my original WM version... but what an unfortunate stipulation. The license really 'ought' to just transfer from WM device to an iTunes account... not to a specific device.

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[mikelove]

Fair enough, but it's worth noting that a lot of iPhone software developers are actually keeping their iPhone / iPad apps totally separate, so even people who purchased originally on iPhone can't move their licenses over - even true for some relatively expensive apps. Given that it took a grand total of about 5 days to do the iPad optimizations for 2.1, it would be pretty creepy for us to voluntarily block iPad transfers at the moment, and in general I expect sales to markets we wouldn't even reach otherwise (schools, military, Android users) to more than cover what we'll spend on further iPad-specific development, but there are certainly some other developers who see this as an entirely separate product. And with the cheapest iPad costing $500, I can't say I'm entirely unsympathetic to companies that feel they deserve another $10 or $20 for a totally redesigned app that runs on a device that's currently several orders of magnitude less common than iPhone.

One-device-per-copy has always been our policy, though - it's been spelled out in license agreements for years, we actually had to go around renegotiating a bunch of them to add that exception for iTunes sales (without which we wouldn't have been able to offer their content on iPhone at all). So people who carry around two different WM devices (a little HTC Touch for on-the-go use and a big honking iPAQ 211 for home, say) have had to put up with this for a long time.

 

[kohoutek]

Understood. And again, I love the product. Wasn't trying to flame or anything... and like I said, am already thrilled to just have it on one of the devices so thanks again.

Guess I'll just have to see if I really use the full version more on one or the other. It's too soon to tell to be honest.

Thanks!

 

[LiAnCrow]

Licenses transferred over from Palm/WM are subject to the same one-device-at-a-time rule they were on those, so you're certainly welcome to deactivate your license on your iPhone and move it over to your iPad, but you can't have it active on both at the same time. Not much we can do about this since it's stipulated in several of the copyright licenses we've signed - they only make an exception for products purchased originally on iPhone / iPad, and that only because Apple specifically requires that every device that links to a given iTunes account be able to access all content purchased under that account.

If you've got a lot of flashcards linking to dictionaries that you only have on one device then they're not going to translate over correctly to the other one - you'd want to remap all of your cards to entries in PLC or CC-CEDICT or Adso first. (and you'd need to buy the flashcard module on the iPad if you only have the free version of Pleco on there now)

How are you able to delete "Uncategorized"? It shouldn't even be possible to select it for deletion - is there a check mark next to it or are you deleting all categories on that root screen and encountering a crash at some point during that?

Thanks Mike. Hm...I can't seem to reproduce the problem. Since I've already created a bunch of categories I can't confirm this but I wonder if it only occurs when Uncategorized is the only item in the list.

 

[mikelove]

LiAnCrow - just tested that and yes, it seems like even though there's no indicator "Uncategorized" is getting selected internally when you tap on "All" and causing a crash when you then try to delete it. Should be easy to fix for 2.1.1 anyway - thanks!

 

[Kongruisi]

I have the ipad and have been using it with pleco since it came out.

For me, in class, the document reader is a lifesaver. It lets me read uninterrupted until I need to look something up, at which point it will handily allow me to just click a word. However, I would very much like a way to superimpose a layer on a document that would enable you to freehand write or notate straight on top of the text, like marking text with your finger, for instance. This would help me when I'm reading quickly and want to make quick markings to indicate grammar, etc.

A tighter integration with eBooks would be great on so many levels it's hard to describe. Much like the dictionary in Apple's ebook reader lets me easily check obscure words I wouldn't normally bother to look up, "playing with a handicap" while reading Chinese is that much more important to me.

I'm sure Pleco has plenty of bug fixes and improvements coming up, but I have to say I love it. It is the killer app for me, bar none (not even Scrabble!)

PS! Are there comprehensive 文言 dictionaries available for Pleco? I'd love to be able to filter out everything else when I'm trying to make sense of it

 

[mikelove]

Thanks!

Superimposed writing is an interesting idea - would you really be able to draw accurately enough to make that useful, though? Even for underlining / circling words it seems like depending on the font size it might get rather tricky... and how would you want this saved / retained? If it was just drawn on top of the document it might get difficult to line it up if the font size changed, or the orientation did, or if you moved to a device with a different screen size / screen resolution; a better bet might be to provide some way to highlight a particular range of text within Pleco (so that it could be preserved in those word-wrap-varying cases) and then add a note to it somehow.

Tighter integration with Apple's eBook app isn't technically possible at the moment, but doing something with non-copy-protected ePubs certainly might be. And no classical Chinese dictionaries are available in Pleco yet (though PLC actually has pretty good coverage of classical meanings of characters); we've come to the conclusion that we could probably only get a good one in electronic format if it were Chinese-only, so we're still trying to decide on the viability of that based on sales of Guifan.

 

[zukernik]

Hi everyone,
I'm sorry if that question has been asked before but I haven't had the time to go through all of the 10 pages yet. I live in China and recently bought a 水货 iPad that I sync with my Chinese iTunes account so the only way to download apps with my account is by using a computer (it is possible to buy iPad apps on the Chinese iTunes store but it's not possible to access it from an iPad for some reason). The problem with that approach is that I cannot download in app purchases using my iPad. I could download them from my iPhone but I am afraid that it will not be possible to sync them to my iPad since I haven't been able to get in-app purchases in any application so far. I would probably use an American account if I have no other choices but I would rather avoid that since it would mean paying sales taxes on everything I buy. Did anybody else try to sync in-app purchases to an iPad with a Chinese iTunes account?

 

[mikelove]

Hmm... have you gotten any error messages when trying those In-App Purchases? How do you know that they don't work? It could be that there's something wrong with the internet connection on your iPad, though it's also possible that Apple may not be allowing Chinese iTunes accounts to download software to iPads yet since they're not available internationally - if you wait a few weeks they may lift those restrictions after the iPad's international launch, but the safest bet is probably to buy from a US account.

 

[zukernik]

The internet works fine and I have no problems accessing the app store and getting in-app purchases from my American account, however it's not possible to do any of these from my main account using my iPad; it always tells me 'The App Store is not supported in this country'. The weird thing is that most iPad-only apps are already available in the Chinese iTunes store when accessed from a computer so they are probably doing this on purpose to make it more complicated for international owners. So far I only used my American account to buy books since I do not want to sync my apps from multiple accounts every times (and also because US iTunes prepaid cards are quite expensive here).

 

[zukernik]

I also noticed that when using my American account I have a choice between a student price and the normal price while the Chinese account doesn't display any price and pressing 'Buy + Download' gives me an error. Do think it would work if I bought it using my iPhone and then used 'Restore Purchases'?

 

[gato]

What so people mean by a Chinese account? Are you using a Chinese credit card in a Chinese account? Is it an internationally recognized credit card?

 

[zukernik]

What so people mean by a Chinese account? Are you using a Chinese credit card in a Chinese account? Is it an internationally recognized credit card?

Yes, I am using a Mastercard registered in China with my Chinese iTunes account. You need a credit card registered in the USA or prepaid iTunes cards to buy from the US store. I just tried to repurchase updates in an application for which I had previously made in-app purchases using my iPhone and it worked so I guess I could do the same with this app.

 

[zukernik]

I bought the complete bundle with my iPhone and then tried using 'Restore Purchases' on my iPad. Here is the message I got:

Your purchased add-ons have been successfully reactivated. Thanks for using Pleco.

 

[mikelove]

Great! And good to know that that's working in general for other people in the same can't-buy-addons-on-iPad problem.

 

[Kongruisi]

Would it be at all possible to:

1. Use the in-app web browser (under reader) with reader functionality. It doesn't work for me. Right now I'm browsing chinese forums in Safari, and pasting into pleco to read longer texts.
2. Ditto for pdf files. I have a lot of pdfs in chinese I would like to read comfortably (papers on poetry, etc, from cnki.com.cn), but formatting errors are preventing the characters from showing up properly, and -- the reader dictionary doesn't work.
3. Being able to write in the reader. Unless Apple has strict regulations wrt text editing, it should be trivial, right? Papers is a pain in the ass; I can't get normal line breaks when writing chinese.

There are a few entry bugs and niggles when switching between inputs in the ipad and pleco keyboards.

When entering more than one character, it will only give you the first one if there are no compound words containing both. That's annoying when you're hwr'ing in several characters to see how to read phonetic names of stuff (or just making sense of weird sentences).

 

[mikelove]

1) Could you be a little more specific about how it "doesn't work"? What about if you use the Pleco pasteboard option (select the text, then tap on the third button from the left at the bottom of the screen) - can you look up text then? Are you sure you had activated Live Mode before trying to tap on characters to look them up?

2) PDFs are harder to do - there's not really any good support for text selection in them on iPhone OS yet. (or on any other OS for that matter, I suppose )

3) Already there, though it's kind of experimental; go into Settings / Reader and turn on "Enable text editing." Only usable with short documents, though, and not exactly a perfect system even in those...

The compounds issue has been widely discussed and should be fixed in a future update with an MDBG-style breakdown (multiple sections of results for each part of the search query).

 

[Kongruisi]

Re 1: it just doesn't work. Live mode is on and everything. No amount of clicking will bring up anything. Live mode was and is turned on. Often clicking (too much) will just crash the app.

Text editing is sketchy, yeah.

Yeah, pdfs are a pita.

Glad to seeall this stuff is being worked on!

 

[mikelove]

What about with Live Mode off, highlighting text and tapping on that clipboard button - does that work at least? Live Mode crashing is probably just a RAM thing (it's extremely memory-intensive) - the iPad shipped with half as much RAM as it should have; Live Mode should really come into its own on the iPhone HD this summer, assuming Apple is wise enough to stick 512 MB of RAM in it.

 

[character]

[...] Live Mode should really come into its own on the iPhone HD this summer, assuming Apple is wise enough to stick 512 MB of RAM in it.

The latest iPhone prototype found had just 256 MB.

Except for the fact that Apple is a hardware company and wants to sell many versions of iPhones/iPads to the same person, I don't know why they're being so cheap with RAM.