Pleco 2 Is Awesome!!!

[The Duelist]

Hi Mike

Gratz On The Release Of Pleco 2.0

Finally Seeing The Results Of 2 1/2 Years Hard Work Must Be Very Satisfying For You.
Your Passion For An Original Concept,
Has Produced An Innovative, State Of The Art Product.
The New Flashcard Modes, Audio, Text Reader & New Dictionaries
Combine Into An Awesome Chinese Study Tool.

Thanx 8)

I Look Forward To Following The Development Of Future Pleco Application's.

The Duelist

 

[mikelove]

Thank you, both for this and for all of the feedback / bug reports.

 

[trevelyan]

Looks great Mike. Congratulations on the release.

 

[mikelove]

Thanks! Hope all's well with Popup Chinese. (there's a link to it from the add-ons page as a source of Pleco-format flashcard files)

 

[feryl]

Congrats Mike, I love your product and use it almost everyday. it's truly a masterpiece. Looking forward for your future release.
I sincerely wish you a prosperous future, God bless you.

 

[goog1e]

Thanks Mike for such a great program! Like feryl and probably so many others, I use and rely on Pleco every day. The audio database is the best feature ever and the quality is top notch -- even if only the female voice was recorded with noise and all, that would have been enough for me. I'm uber-grateful for the flashcards and all their options because the flashcards have been the cornerstone of my studies. They've allowed me to systematically structure and document my studies with nearly zero effort. I never thought I could focus on studying with so little overhead. For me, Pleco is the absolute right tool for the job and I'm so glad you've made it available. I'm looking forward to all the improvements and new features that will come in the future!

 

[mikelove]

feryl - Thanks!

goog1e - Thanks! Particularly nice to hear that about the female voice, we put in an awful lot of time/effort on that so we're hoping to still salvage it to some degree at least.

 

[Shadowdh]

I would like to add my kudos as well. Pleco 2 is far exceeding my expectations. I love the flashcards, the reader is simply amazing. I use it everyday and the functionality and usefulness is incredible. Such a handy tool. Well done Mike and the team. If I raved about P1 to all and sundry then P2 has turned me certifiable...

 

[mangochutney]

Installed it today.
I'm very impressed so far.
More dict-entries, pronunciation, magnified head-word and most importantly; color coded tones.
I love it.

Ok, now get to work on the iPhone-version, enough kidding around :wink:
(The new icon already looks iPhone-ish…)

 

[mikelove]

Shadowdh - thanks! The response to the reader has been great, so I think it's really going to get a lot of work in future releases.

mangochutney - thanks! Tone coloring's a great little feature, it'd been suggested in textbooks / dictionaries decades ago but AFAIK nobody bothered to put it in an electronic dictionary before us. (and now anyone else who does will look like a copycat )

Progress continues on both iPhone and 2.0.1, just performed the first successful dictionary search / text retrieval ("an1jing4" in OXCE for what it's worth) in Pleco for iPhone on Wednesday; the engine code proved unbelievably easy to port over. (the UI, however, is a different story)

 

[mangochutney]

thanks! Tone coloring's a great little feature, it'd been suggested in textbooks / dictionaries decades ago but AFAIK nobody bothered to put it in an electronic dictionary before us. (and now anyone else who does will look like a copycat )

If I see anyone doing it I will scream "You copied Pleco, you copied Pleco!"
Seriously it feels just more natural.
I think I'll leave the tone-sign on for a couple of days, till I have memorized the colors, and then simply switch them off.

Another great thing are the stroke-order diagrams! I mean, I was lucky enough to attend an extensive calligraphy class and kinda know how to draw characters, but still, it's great to look up stuff like this, when I encounter a character which I have never seem/drawn before.
I only installed this yesterday evening, and already two friends of mine were checking every second word. Their $200 Besta and Sharp dicts don't have that function.

Progress continues on both iPhone and 2.0.1, just performed the first successful dictionary search / text retrieval ("an1jing4" in OXCE for what it's worth) in Pleco for iPhone on Wednesday; the engine code proved unbelievably easy to port over. (the UI, however, is a different story)

This is news everybody would love to hear in the iPhone-thread

 

[Henry]

Every couple days I 'discover' a new feature in 2... I'm loving it!

I'm looking forward to the two new dictionaries for Christmas. And hopefully to the Wiseman/Feng Chinese Med. dictionary sometime soon!

Regards, Henry

 

[estudiando]

The full text search (reverse look up) in ABC is awesome. If you look for "flying saucer" in NPW you don't find it, but if you do full text search for "flying saucer" in ABC, it gives you the correct entry. This in itself is a superb english-chinese dictionary. Congrats on the progress on iPhone. the folks at Olivetree finally got all of their applications approved by Apple. The latest versions allow you to download purchased titles from their website.

 

[mikelove]

mangochutney - stroke order's a great addition, yeah; that's one of those features people were asking us for back in 2001 that it took us 7 years to actually get around to adding. Should get even better in 2.1 with the new data we licensed from Wenlin (allowing us to do things like highlight the radical, allow you to choose between multiple character styles, etc).

And I'd rather not feed the frenzy by commenting on iPhone in the actual iPhone thread

Henry - thanks! Wiseman will be out as soon as we can get it ready, though there's a little extra coding involved since we have to make the single database searchable both as E-C and C-E.

estudiando - thanks! Fulltext search is actually a pretty good argument for having a bundle with just a C-E dictionary at some point. Good news about Olivetree though I'm not going to really feel solid about that until our iPhone app is approved / available too.

 

[mangochutney]

Should get even better in 2.1 with the new data we licensed from Wenlin (allowing us to do things like highlight the radical, allow you to choose between multiple character styles, etc)..

You're today's Captain Awesome 8)
I actually forgot how often I use this feature in Wenlin.
This is gonna be fun.

 

[mikelove]

Yeah, really excited about that - component search will be fun, too, the radical search hasn't been measurably improved in 7 years and this would finally be a way to add a new feature to it.

 

[japple]

Last night, after a couple of tries, I managed to upgrade to the latest version on my TX.
This product is world class and I am so grateful for the free upgrade.
Thank you very much for this wonderful program.
Now I have no excuse to improving my Chinese.

Thank you Mike.

 

[Shadowdh]

Mike with the new release of the 2.01 final I would just like to say again that Pleco is the best bar none for Chinese learning. It keeps getting better and more functional with every release (even the betas)... The reader blows my mind and its just so handy and useful, the flashcard utility is awesome and has helped me with my characters incredibly. Overall its a fantastic piece of kit that no Chinese learner should do without... Many thanks for all the hard work put in by yourself and the team... well done!!!

 

[mikelove]

japple - thanks! Particularly nice to hear this from a TX user since it helps to make it feel like all of the work we put in getting 2.0 working on Palm (in spite of Palm OS' bleak / discontinued future) was worthwhile.

Shadowdh - thanks! I really like this gradually-adding-features-in-the-betas development approach, actually - much better to do things that way than all-at-once (or nearly all at once) as in 2.0.0.