Pleco and iOS 5

[joybealee]

Hie

I'm a pure Iphone user without not much of a technical knowledge.

I'd just to know, is it possible to backup all my Pleco data via the old fashioned method of just syncing thru the Itunes ?
And if possible, where are the data updated and back up ? I need to keep them safe and sound !

I do not want to have anything to do with iCloud syncing and back up !
The last time I update my iphone to the ios5, all my data w Pleco was gone ! :evil:

Please help ! All my son's chinese words and help are all gone. ANd I do not wish for such a thing to happen again !

 

[mikelove]

Hie

I'm a pure Iphone user without not much of a technical knowledge.

I'd just to know, is it possible to backup all my Pleco data via the old fashioned method of just syncing thru the Itunes ?
And if possible, where are the data updated and back up ? I need to keep them safe and sound !

I do not want to have anything to do with iCloud syncing and back up !
The last time I update my iphone to the ios5, all my data w Pleco was gone ! :evil:

Please help ! All my son's chinese words and help are all gone. ANd I do not wish for such a thing to happen again !

Did you restore your phone from the backup on your computer after updating to OS 5? The backup might still be on your computer even if you didn't restore it before - do you remember syncing your phone with iTunes to back it up before you did the OS update?

Anyway, you can certainly still back up to iTunes; OS 5 lets you choose whether to back it up that way or to iCloud. However, the format of iTunes backups isn't really user-accessible, so if you want a backed-up file that you can keep track of yourself / copy wherever you want / etc, see these instructions.

 

[Vzzzbx]

It may be a bit late to do this now, but before any important upgrade I make a backup of all my Pleco flashcards (as per Mike's link) and email the .pdb file to myself. That way you can circumvent iCloud, iTunes, everything.

 

[character]

Pleco 2.2.8 (and previous version) on iOS 5:

When I press and hold on a dictionary result, the flashcard is added correctly, but then I am taken to the dictionary entry for the character. I think this is a bug when running on iOS 5.

---

Mike, is synching flashcards through iCloud being worked on? It would make Pleco even awesomer.

 

[mikelove]

When I press and hold on a dictionary result, the flashcard is added correctly, but then I am taken to the dictionary entry for the character. I think this is a bug when running on iOS 5.

Thanks - we'll fix this in the next update. Though that may not be for a little while, since there are probably a few other obscure iOS 5 bugs out there too and we'd like to make sure we cover all of them next time.

Mike, is synching flashcards through iCloud being worked on? It would make Pleco even awesomer.

It is, but it's a lot trickier for us than for many app developers because we have to do more than just move the data back and forth, we also have to be able to resolve conflicts; many of our customers connect their devices to the internet very infrequently (or in some cases almost never), so a cloud sync won't work well for us unless it can take two diverging versions of the flashcard database and merge them. Otherwise you'll keep getting ugly alerts about the database having changed on both your iPhone and your iPad since the last sync and asking you which version you want to keep. So that means all kinds of extra code needed to reassign flashcard and category IDs (can't have two things sharing the same ID), generate / compare lists of changes since the last sync, etc.

We may draw the line at some things - for example, if you review the same flashcard on two different devices, when the databases are merged we'll probably just pick the score information from the more recent review, since adding the extra data needed to combine the results from both reviews would make the database a lot bigger and hence a lot slower to sync.

 

[numble]

I would probably pay for a Subscription to a "Newstand" product that did something like newsinchinese.com every day/week with Pleco-licensed dictionaries. to better monetize, you could probably sort subscriptions by Chinese-level. RSS readers and Instapaper seeem to get around needing to license news articles, and some may be public domain--and Chih Ping Chou uses Chinese newspapers like Renmin Ribao in his textbooks.

I guess I'd settle for something in-app that requires me to tap a bunch of times to get to, if it had notifications for new content.

I know Newstand is annoying to power users, but it has led to a surge in purchases of those products ( http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/medi ... criptions/ ), and I think a "learn Chinese" periodical would do quite well there.

 

[mikelove]

I would probably pay for a Subscription to a "Newstand" product that did something like newsinchinese.com every day/week with Pleco-licensed dictionaries. to better monetize, you could probably sort subscriptions by Chinese-level. RSS readers and Instapaper seeem to get around needing to license news articles, and some may be public domain--and Chih Ping Chou uses Chinese newspapers like Renmin Ribao in his textbooks.

I guess I'd settle for something in-app that requires me to tap a bunch of times to get to, if it had notifications for new content.

I know Newstand is annoying to power users, but it has led to a surge in purchases of those products ( http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/medi ... criptions/ ), and I think a "learn Chinese" periodical would do quite well there.

See my comment on http://www.plecoforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=2876 - it'd take quite a lot of staff time to make this work, and I do think we'd need some licenses in order to have a sufficient supply of high-quality content, though I agree it'd be a neat thing if we could pull it off.

 

[numble]

In lieu of full-fledged content, how about a "Word of the Day" notification? I think they can be done without the need for a push server, too. Maybe even allow customization by HSK level, blacklisting of flashcard listed words, etc.

 

[mikelove]

In lieu of full-fledged content, how about a "Word of the Day" notification? I think they can be done without the need for a push server, too. Maybe even allow customization by HSK level, blacklisting of flashcard listed words, etc.

Doable, but I've always thought of those as kind of a gimmick... vocabulary retention is going to be very low that way. Better to come up with an improved UI for when we add new "unlearned" cards to your pool.