Oxford Dictionary Release date???

[congeeking]

Hi Mike,

Great work on Pleco -- I have a few concerns about the UI being not as intuitive & usable as it could be (I feel like there are some lingering vestiges of Pleco's beginnings in Palm/WM), but I'm sure this is being addressed in the upcoming major update. It also couldn't hurt if the app was a bit "prettier."

Niggling concerns aside, what I'm really wondering about is when will the Oxford Dictionary finally be made available to iOS users? Apologies if this was already addressed in another thread, but a quick search didn't seem to turn up much info, and I ain't gonna spend hours of my time diggin.'
I was THIS close to scanning the whole damned paper dictionary and loading it up as a *.pdf on my iPad or iPhone -- that's how much I love this dictionary. So you can imagine how overjoyed I was to hear that it's on its way.

Hopefully, your work on the Android version isn't taking away too much from your iOS development -- compared to Android's userbase, iOS users are generally more loyal and willing to actually pay good money for things. I don't want to generalize and say Android users tend to be cheapskates, but it's kinda true. Case in point: My brother just picked up a Galaxy Nexus (his first modern smartphone), and he refuses to pay more than a dollar for any chinese dictionary on his phone. He'd think I was insane if he heard how much I've already spent on Pleco add-ons. Yet he's an even more avid learner of Chinese than I am. So I really hope you're not abandoning your loyal iOS users to chase after a legion of Android users who wouldn't even pay a dime for quality software.

I apologize in advance to the Android users on this forum who don't fit into my broad generalizations.

 

[mikelove]

Great work on Pleco -- I have a few concerns about the UI being not as intuitive & usable as it could be (I feel like there are some lingering vestiges of Pleco's beginnings in Palm/WM), but I'm sure this is being addressed in the upcoming major update. It also couldn't hurt if the app was a bit "prettier."

Thank you! We are indeed addressing a lot of those concerns - for example, dictionary entries are now much more nicely line-spaced, since we're no longer designing everything to work well on tiny 2.5-inch screens.

Niggling concerns aside, what I'm really wondering about is when will the Oxford Dictionary finally be made available to iOS users? Apologies if this was already addressed in another thread, but a quick search didn't seem to turn up much info, and I ain't gonna spend hours of my time diggin.'
I was THIS close to scanning the whole damned paper dictionary and loading it up as a *.pdf on my iPad or iPhone -- that's how much I love this dictionary. So you can imagine how overjoyed I was to hear that it's on its way.

It should be included in the batch of new dictionaries we're launching this spring. The data files are already ready, but we can't launch it now for business reasons; we'd have to reshuffle our bundles around it now only to reshuffle them again when we launch the other new dictionaries, which would cause all sorts of annoyance / confusion among our users.

Hopefully, your work on the Android version isn't taking away too much from your iOS development -- compared to Android's userbase, iOS users are generally more loyal and willing to actually pay good money for things. I don't want to generalize and say Android users tend to be cheapskates, but it's kinda true. Case in point: My brother just picked up a Galaxy Nexus (his first modern smartphone), and he refuses to pay more than a dollar for any chinese dictionary on his phone. He'd think I was insane if he heard how much I've already spent on Pleco add-ons. Yet he's an even more avid learner of Chinese than I am. So I really hope you're not abandoning your loyal iOS users to chase after a legion of Android users who wouldn't even pay a dime for quality software.

Well remember that our customers aren't really typical smartphone users - few iOS owners are willing to pay what we charge either. Android is important because for a lot of people iOS really just isn't a workable option - it's too expensive or it's not available on their chosen carrier or doesn't support some feature they need. But as I said in this post, supporting Android, while time-consuming, has yielded a lot of benefits on the iOS side too; fundamentally, if it gets us more customers then that means more money and more pull with publishers, both of which help us to get new licenses.

 

[yoose]

It should be included in the batch of new dictionaries we're launching this spring. The data files are already ready, but we can't launch it now for business reasons; we'd have to reshuffle our bundles around it now only to reshuffle them again when we launch the other new dictionaries, which would cause all sorts of annoyance / confusion among our users.

Spring! was hoping we would get it for my upcoming semester, but I am sure it is the best decision (i totally blame apple for the lack of flexibility they give developers for stuff like this). Crossing my fingers that you also get the cantonese dictionary license by that time (i have itunes gift cards ready to go )

 

[Tezuk]

It should be included in the batch of new dictionaries we're launching this spring. The data files are already ready, but we can't launch it now for business reasons; we'd have to reshuffle our bundles around it now only to reshuffle them again when we launch the other new dictionaries, which would cause all sorts of annoyance / confusion among our users.

Spring! was hoping we would get it for my upcoming semester, but I am sure it is the best decision (i totally blame apple for the lack of flexibility they give developers for stuff like this). Crossing my fingers that you also get the cantonese dictionary license by that time (i have itunes gift cards ready to go )

My situation exactly: blame apple, hoping for Cantonese and have gift cards on the ready!

 

[Vzzzbx]

Ha! I bought the gift cards for these dictionaries about six months ago. (Not that I'm complaining about the 2.3 delays; I paid for the current version, which works incredibly well, and can see no justification for being all entitled about future releases.)

 

[mikelove]

Spring! was hoping we would get it for my upcoming semester, but I am sure it is the best decision (i totally blame apple for the lack of flexibility they give developers for stuff like this). Crossing my fingers that you also get the cantonese dictionary license by that time (i have itunes gift cards ready to go )

We're seriously getting to a point on Cantonese licenses where the only way to work around the logistical hassles may be me for me to show up at a publisher's office with a bag full of 100 RMB notes Never had this much difficulty licensing something ostensibly this simple - with something like a Chengyu or a Classical dictionary we'd generally have half a dozen different options to choose from.

Ha! I bought the gift cards for these dictionaries about six months ago. (Not that I'm complaining about the 2.3 delays; I paid for the current version, which works incredibly well, and can see no justification for being all entitled about future releases.)

Much appreciated, but I still feel bad about the delays...

 

[yoose]

My situation exactly: blame apple, hoping for Cantonese and have gift cards on the ready!

Good to know that I am not alone!

Spring! was hoping we would get it for my upcoming semester, but I am sure it is the best decision (i totally blame apple for the lack of flexibility they give developers for stuff like this). Crossing my fingers that you also get the cantonese dictionary license by that time (i have itunes gift cards ready to go )

We're seriously getting to a point on Cantonese licenses where the only way to work around the logistical hassles may be me for me to show up at a publisher's office with a bag full of 100 RMB notes Never had this much difficulty licensing something ostensibly this simple - with something like a Chengyu or a Classical dictionary we'd generally have half a dozen different options to choose from.

Sigh... sorry to hear you are having so many issues. I wonder why Cantonese publishers are so much trouble. Maybe they want you to go in person so you can take them out for drinks Im in HK for Chinese New Years, so let me know if you need me to go kick down some doors although with the new year coming up they might not even be there. Unfortunately, I do not have any contacts in the publishing world here.

Ha! I bought the gift cards for these dictionaries about six months ago. (Not that I'm complaining about the 2.3 delays; I paid for the current version, which works incredibly well, and can see no justification for being all entitled about future releases.)

I agree, the current version works great; it has been invaluable in my studies. The current has some quirks, but i dont mind them that much. Just knowing how great Pleco is is whats making me want the Cantonese dictionary. I didn't think about having it before Pleco and for that I blame Mike :lol: I bought the gift cards recently when walmart had 20% off.

 

[congeeking]

So do the reasons for the delay rest solely on Apple's approval process, or is it something to do with the myriad of licensing agreements you have with these publishers? I ask because I'm somewhat uncomfortable with Apple being made a convenient scapegoat -- not by anyone from Pleco explicitly, but by users on these forums. Unless Apple is truly at fault here, a lack of official comment from Mike on these "I blame Apple" statements only serves to validate such sentiments.

Of course, if it's really Apple who's keeping me from my Oxford dictionary, then $#%@% 'em! I just find it silly though when people rag on Apple for being "restrictive" with their curated Appstore -- given (1) the Appstore's immense success; and (2) Android's issues with security & crapware in their Marketplace (e.g. apps secretly installing stuff & fake Siri apps???), I know I can't be alone here in thinking that Apple's approach looks pretty damn convincing. It's nice not having to worry about what I download on my iPhone, and if I really need to sideload anything, there's always Cydia & SSH...

 

[mikelove]

So do the reasons for the delay rest solely on Apple's approval process, or is it something to do with the myriad of licensing agreements you have with these publishers? I ask because I'm somewhat uncomfortable with Apple being made a convenient scapegoat -- not by anyone from Pleco explicitly, but by users on these forums. Unless Apple is truly at fault here, a lack of official comment from Mike on these "I blame Apple" statements only serves to validate such sentiments.

It's not the approval process so much as the nature of their in-app purchasing system.

When we sell something through our own store, we can make pretty much whatever arrangements we want regarding refunds, discounts, upgrades, etc - if we wanted to temporarily add Oxford to a new "Complete Bundle," sell that for a few months, then roll out a bunch of new bundles after that, we'd just raise the price of the Complete bundle a bit, add Oxford, then raise it again when we launch the new dictionaries and add them. People who bought after the Oxford launch would get Oxford, people who bought after the new dictionary launch would get those, people who bought before those points would get a generous upgrade discount and get the additional dictionaries for something close to the difference in price between the old and new bundles.

With Apple, however, all we can really do is create a specific catalog item and set a name and a price for it. We can update that name and price later, but since Apple's in-app purchasing system allows unlimited, anonymous re-purchasing - i.e., somebody can buy the same thing again, not be charged for it, and as far our system is concerned look completely identical to a new purchase (there's literally no way to tell) - we'd have to either give the Oxford to everyone who'd bought the old bundle for free, or deactivate the Complete bundle, launch a new "Complete Bundle 2012," and deal with a flurry of complaints / refund requests from users who assumed it was the same thing and that they could repurchase it without being charged again. Or we could come up with some other name for the new bundle that we'd be selling for the next few months, again causing a lot of confusion when we launch new bundles again so soon after doing that. And all of these bundle launches / name changes are of course subject to Apple's approval and the attendant delays.

We also have almost zero flexibility regarding upgrades - you're not supposed to create any user-specific items, i.e., we can't create a dictionary bundle that's specially discounted / only available to people who bought such-and-such other item before. So if we want to, say, charge $20 for the Oxford dictionary, raise the bundle price by $10, and charge $10 for people who bought the old bundle, there'd be no way to do that without violating Apple's rules. We haven't actually tested this rule and it may be loosely enforced, but that's the official word from them anyway. And there's absolutely no way to offer coupons or user-specific discounts or anything like that.

Basically, "non-consumable" in-app purchases (the type we use - others are "consumable," things like extra virtual gold for your virtual warrior that you can only use once, and "subscription" for periodicals and other services) are designed primarily for selling single units of content and don't lend themselves well to "bundles." And since bundles make up the lion's share of our revenue, we're stuck awkwardly fitting them into Apple's system. If we just sold 3 or 4 add-ons and didn't offer a discount for buying them together then this would be much less of a problem, but there's no way for us to go back to that approach now. So given how much money goes through the IAP system, Apple really needs to give it some more flexibility.

(I should add, however, that Android's IAP system isn't much better; it doesn't have that can't-tell-that-this-is-a-repurchase issue - on Android it just pops up an error and tells the user to Restore Purchases instead - but it's similarly unfriendly to bundles).

Of course, if it's really Apple who's keeping me from my Oxford dictionary, then $#%@% 'em! I just find it silly though when people rag on Apple for being "restrictive" with their curated Appstore -- given (1) the Appstore's immense success; and (2) Android's issues with security & crapware in their Marketplace (e.g. apps secretly installing stuff & fake Siri apps???), I know I can't be alone here in thinking that Apple's approach looks pretty damn convincing. It's nice not having to worry about what I download on my iPhone, and if I really need to sideload anything, there's always Cydia & SSH...

I love Apple and iOS in general, don't get me wrong - I wish we could have just stayed on iOS and ignored Android - but this particular aspect of iOS has given us nothing but trouble; it's been available for two-and-a-half years now, and yet they haven't really upgraded it at all except to add support for auto-renewing subscriptions for the sake of magazine publishers. And it still has lots of bugs and quirks - I'd say roughly 2/3 of our customer support requests relate to something going wrong with restoring purchases in IAP.

 

[yoose]

So do the reasons for the delay rest solely on Apple's approval process, or is it something to do with the myriad of licensing agreements you have with these publishers? I ask because I'm somewhat uncomfortable with Apple being made a convenient scapegoat -- not by anyone from Pleco explicitly, but by users on these forums. Unless Apple is truly at fault here, a lack of official comment from Mike on these "I blame Apple" statements only serves to validate such sentiments.

Of course, if it's really Apple who's keeping me from my Oxford dictionary, then $#%@% 'em! I just find it silly though when people rag on Apple for being "restrictive" with their curated Appstore -- given (1) the Appstore's immense success; and (2) Android's issues with security & crapware in their Marketplace (e.g. apps secretly installing stuff & fake Siri apps???), I know I can't be alone here in thinking that Apple's approach looks pretty damn convincing. It's nice not having to worry about what I download on my iPhone, and if I really need to sideload anything, there's always Cydia & SSH...

i have nothing against the iOS system, its great. they are a bit restrictive in terms of what apps have access to, some of it due to security reasons some of it for unknown reasons. the problem I have in this case is what mike stated about the flexible of in-app purchases for developers. if it was more flexible Mike could put dictionaries up as he got them and give discounts later for buying additional libraries. As it stands now, Mike wants to wait for all the dictionaries he has planned so us users can buy it as a whole bundle, which is a benefit to us and something I appreciate. the licensing issue is of course not apple's fault and its also not an approval issue, but the iOS ecosystem is not without its faults.

 

[ACardiganAndAFrown]

How about those of us that had previously purchased the "Oxford E&C Dictionary" for the palm? Will there be some other sort of 优惠?

 

[mikelove]

How about those of us that had previously purchased the "Oxford E&C Dictionary" for the palm? Will there be some other sort of 优惠?

No, there should actually be an option for that very soon - it's really just new sales that we have to wait on.

 

[alanmd]

Spring is great news- the feature that I am waiting for most is the multi-dictionary search.

The iOS in-app purchasing problem does sound like a real headache. As a current 'complete' buyer, I completely understand that I won't get newly licensed content or the results of major development work for 'free' in the future. I would like to be able to upgrade to the new 'complete' as part of a bundle however.

One idea- how about adding the major version to the name of the 'Complete' bundle in the future? I have the current 'complete', which would be known as 'Complete 2.2', and entitles me to all content that exists in Pleco 2.2.X. You could then add a ‘Complete 2.3’ bundle and a '2.2 to 2.3 upgrade' bundle when 2.3 is released. Of course nothing prevents non-bundle owners from buying the upgrade alone, but they are missing out on a lot of content in the main bundle if they do, and if the cost of 'Complete 2.2' + '2.2 to 2.3 upgrade' = ‘Complete 2.3’ then they are not really getting something for nothing.

 

[mikelove]

Spring is great news- the feature that I am waiting for most is the multi-dictionary search.

That should definitely be there, it's already 90% working in our Android betas (we're shipping it as an off-by-default optional feature in that) and once we do some tweaking to how it matches up entries from dictionaries with slightly different interpretations of tone sandhi it should be close to 100%.

The iOS in-app purchasing problem does sound like a real headache. As a current 'complete' buyer, I completely understand that I won't get newly licensed content or the results of major development work for 'free' in the future. I would like to be able to upgrade to the new 'complete' as part of a bundle however.

We'll offer bundle-discounted prices on the new dictionaries, but there may not even be a new 'complete' bundle since we'd have to charge something like $300 for it.

One idea- how about adding the major version to the name of the 'Complete' bundle in the future? I have the current 'complete', which would be known as 'Complete 2.2', and entitles me to all content that exists in Pleco 2.2.X. You could then add a ‘Complete 2.3’ bundle and a '2.2 to 2.3 upgrade' bundle when 2.3 is released. Of course nothing prevents non-bundle owners from buying the upgrade alone, but they are missing out on a lot of content in the main bundle if they do, and if the cost of 'Complete 2.2' + '2.2 to 2.3 upgrade' = ‘Complete 2.3’ then they are not really getting something for nothing.

The problem with that is that it isn't necessarily obvious to somebody that that difference is big enough to make it non-repurchaseable; they'll assume that their Complete 2.2 purchase also entitles them to Complete 2.3 and cheerfully tap "Buy" expecting that they'll get the "you've already purchased this item" message. It also may make Complete bundle buyers worry that their "Complete 2.2" purchase only entitles them to use version 2.2 of our software and and they'll have to pay to upgrade even if they only want to use their existing content in 2.3.

 

[goldyn chyld]

I'm also eagerly awaiting new version of Pleco with all the goodies... 8)

 

[hleperlier]

Now I understand, Mike, why it's so complex. All things considered Pleco is a great company. I'm looking forward to the Cantonese dictionary and hopefully the Oxford licensing for those of us who bought it on a … Palm. My, Pleco has been around for ages!
Also, any advance on licensing with Hokkien (with the publishers I suggested).


Thank you Mike

 

[mikelove]

Now I understand, Mike, why it's so complex. All things considered Pleco is a great company. I'm looking forward to the Cantonese dictionary and hopefully the Oxford licensing for those of us who bought it on a … Palm. My, Pleco has been around for ages!
Also, any advance on licensing with Hokkien (with the publishers I suggested).

Nothing on that yet - first priority dialect-dictionary-wise is Cantonese, but once we finally pull that off we can start to look at other options like Hokkien.

 

[Tezuk]

Hey Mike,

You mentioned in the email that Cantonese recording would take around a further 6 months to complete. Even without a Cantonese dictionary, I think a lot of people would be interested in buying Cantonese audio just for basic character look-up. There are very few resources for character recordings in Cantonese; the one I use (http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/lexi-can/) isn't great to be honest.

Out of interest, I read your post about the popularity of Pleco in Singapore. Do you think Singaporeans would also be interested in 'dialect' (Cantonese, Hokkien etc.) dictionaries or do you foresee interest in these dictionaries to come only from Western countries?