For those of you who haven't subscribed to the mailing list:
From mikelove at pleco.com Tue Nov 11 22:49:02 2008
From: mikelove at pleco.com (Michael Love)
Date: Tue Nov 11 22:49:05 2008
Subject: [Pleco Software] Pleco 2.0 Released!
Message-ID: <491A603E.2060106@pleco.com>
NOTE: you're receiving this message because you signed up to receive
product announcements from Pleco Software. If you prefer not to receive
emails like this from us in the future, send a blank email to
"pleco-announce-unsubscribe@pleco.com", or visit
http://www.pleco.com/company.html , enter your email address in the
blank next to "Unsubscribe" under "Mailing List, and click the
"Unsubscribe" button.
Greetings,
After two-and-a-half years in development and many many delays, I'm
pleased to announce that the latest version of our Chinese dictionary
software, Pleco 2.0, is finally available for Palm OS and Windows
Mobile. (an iPhone version is also in development; see below for more on
that)
Pleco 2.0 boasts an enormous number of new features, including audio
pronunciation of dictionary headwords, stroke order diagrams, a built-in
document reader, full-text search, much better cross-referencing, and a
completely rewritten flashcard system with lots of new test types and
new ways to organize cards. We've also made a lot of under-the-hood
improvements, like ARM-accelerated code for faster performance on Palm
and a new font system for more compatible / less buggy Chinese text
rendering on Windows Mobile.
We're also selling three new dictionaries along with Pleco 2.0: the
"21st Century" English-Chinese Dictionary, which at 280,000 entries is
more than 10x larger than the NWP English-Chinese (though it doesn't
include Pinyin), the "Tuttle Learner's" Chinese-English Dictionary, a
beginner-oriented dictionary with detailed explanations and lots of
example sentences, and the "Xiandai Hanyu Guifan Cidian," our first ever
Chinese-Chinese dictionary and a really wonderful reference work in general.
PRICING / UPGRADES
Most of Pleco 2.0 is available as a free upgrade to anyone who owns
version 1.0; the only parts of 2.0 left out of the free upgrade are the
new dictionaries, stroke order diagrams, and audio pronunciation, though
the latter two are free for anyone who bought the Professional or
Complete version of PlecoDict after July 1st of 2006. The upgrade guide
in the instruction manual at
http://www.pleco.com/manual/upgradeguide.html has an easy step-by-step
guide to upgrading to Pleco 2.0, including instructions for converting
your flashcards to the new format; basically you just download and
install the new version from http://www.pleco.com/downloads.html and
then go to the "My Orders" page at http://www.pleco.com/orders.html to
activate it and receive a new keyfile.
(if our website looks weird / distorted when you load it, just click
your browser's Refresh / Reload button and that should clear it up)
The Xiandai Hanyu Guifan Cidian and 21st Century English-Chinese
Dictionary upgrades are priced at US $59.95 each; we also offer the two
of them bundled together $79.95. The Tuttle Learner's dictionary costs
$29.95.
If you didn't receive the stroke order / audio modules as a free
upgrade, you can purchase the stroke order one for $14.95, the audio one
for $19.95 or both together for $29.95; customers who bought the Basic
version of Pleco after that July 1st 2006 cutoff date can get the two
modules together for only $9.95.
Finally, you can get the Guifan Cidian / 21st Century dictionary
upgrades along with the stroke order / audio modules for a grand total
of $99.95.
Along with the release of Pleco 2.0, we're also making version 1.0
available on Palm OS only (and without a free upgrade to 2.0) at roughly
a 30% discount, with the option to upgrade to 2.0 later for just the
difference in price; we're hoping this will make our software affordable
for a larger number of people, particularly as the prices of used Palm
OS handhelds continue to drop.
WHY IT TOOK SO LONG
There are a number of reasons why it's taken us so much longer than we
expected to get Pleco 2.0 ready.
The biggest one is what people in the software industry call "feature
creep" - we tried to do far too many things in just one update, when in
hindsight we would have been better off spreading them out between three
or four different releases. Adding too much new code to a project at
once increases the odds of one piece of code conflicting with another,
and in the case of 2.0 we added so much new stuff that we ended up
spending as much time getting it all working together as we would have
if we'd written a brand new program from scratch. This had even more of
an impact on the debugging than initial programming, which is why Pleco
2.0 has theoretically been in "beta testing" for more than a year now -
most of the new features have been in place for a long time, but it's
taken a ton of work to get them actually working reliably.
Another reason, unfortunately, is our continued support for Palm OS.
Many of the things we wanted to in Pleco 2.0 were incredibly difficult
to do on Palm given its many technical limitations, and while we
eventually did find ways to implement all of them, it took us a really
really long time. When we started working on 2.0 back in the spring of
2006, continuing to fully support (and even encourage customers to buy)
Palm devices seemed like a sensible business move; a new version of Palm
OS was supposedly on the way, Treos were among the best smartphones you
could buy and the competition was comparatively weak. Now, however,
between HTC's increasingly-polished Windows Mobile phones, the rise of
BlackBerry among non-business users, Google Android, and, of course,
iPhone (which wasn't even announced until January of '07 and only
started supporting third-party software a few months ago), along with
the fact that Palm hasn't released a significant software update since
2004, Palm OS starts to look less and less attractive as a platform for
Pleco.
So our biggest remaining reason for supporting Palm is the large number
of Pleco users who already own Palm OS devices; if not for that
installed base, we probably would have dropped Palm support halfway
through developing 2.0, but abandoning our loyal customers would be a
terrible business move even if we didn't sell a single new copy of 2.0
on Palm. Having gone to all of this effort, we certainly aren't planning
to immediately stop supporting Palm either, and all of the 2.0.x bug
fixes / minor updates should be available on Palm as well as on Windows
Mobile. Major updates, however, are a different story; Pleco 2.1 is
about 50-50 to appear on Palm and Pleco 3.0 most likely will not. Given
how long it takes us to put out new releases, it's unlikely you'll
actually see the impact of this for quite a while, but nonetheless, if
you currently own a Palm OS handheld / smartphone, you might want to
consider switching to Windows Mobile the next time you upgrade, at least
if you'd like to continue using the latest versions of Pleco. (you can
switch from the Palm OS to the Windows Mobile version of Pleco
free-of-charge in most cases)
THANKS
Pleco 2.0 has been a team effort, not just by people actually working
for Pleco but by our customers as well, and I want to take a moment to
especially thank the hundred or so Pleco users who've helped us out by
beta-testing 2.0 and submitting feedback and bug reports; there's no way
this product could be anything close to what it is without all of your
efforts, and I hope every time you fire up 2.0 you derive some pride and
satisfaction from having played so big a role in helping to create it.
Thanks also to everyone else who's submitted feedback and bug reports
over the years; we've gotten where we are today by listening to our
customers, but the biggest reason that strategy has worked so well is
because we have such wonderful customers, and without your ideas,
insights and occasional nagging Pleco would be far less useful than it is.
Thanks, finally, to everyone who bought version 1.0, and especially
those of you who've recommended it to others - many of the new features
in 2.0 have cost a great deal of money to develop and license, and the
reason we were able to afford them (and to spend as long as we have
debugging / refining / getting everything working just right) is because
of all of you.
WHAT'S NEXT / IPHONE
The next announcement email you get from us will probably be about Pleco
2.0.1, which along with fixing any bugs we find in 2.0.0 should also
hopefully come with at least one more new dictionary (and possibly two);
we've licensed a Traditional Chinese Medical dictionary (Nigel Wiseman's
"Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine") which we know a lot of
people are eager to see released, and there are a couple of other titles
in the pipeline as well. There'll most likely be a 2.0.2/2.0.3/etc at
some point in the not too distant future too.
The next major project we're working on is an iPhone / iPod Touch
version of Pleco; after our experience with repeatedly missing release
dates for 2.0, we're not going to be saying anything about them for
iPhone (seriously; if you write us the day before it's released we'll
probably still tell you we have no idea when it's going to be ready),
and thanks to Apple's software approval requirements we can't say
anything definitive about pricing / upgrade policies yet either, so
about all I can tell you is that all but one of our dictionary licenses
(including the ABC) already cover iPhone, which means it should at least
be possible for us to bring over almost all of the features from the
Palm / WM versions; we're not yet certain about which features we
actually will put in the iPhone version, though, and some things may get
cut out at least initially to save time (or because we can't come up
with a good way to adapt them to an iPhone's interface).
We're also planning a desktop version of Pleco for both Windows and Mac
OS X, and most of our licenses (including the all-important handwriting
recognizer) will carry over to that as well - there's some possibility
we might be releasing a "preview version" of that for Windows in the
not-too-distant future (which would basically just be the Windows Mobile
version recompiled to work on desktop Windows but without any added
features), but the "real" desktop version likely won't be out until
after the iPhone one.
And we're also working on a lot of new features for our current
software, of course - we've just recently licensed a new data set that
should let us add some interesting new stuff involving character
components (multi-radical search etc), we've got some exciting ideas
about grammar and example sentences, and there are all sorts of
refinements and improvements to make to the things we've just added in
2.0 (the beta-test alone has generated a couple of hundred suggestions),
so we're not going to be running out of projects anytime soon.
As always, we welcome your feedback / bug reports / complaints / feature
suggestions; you can send them to me at mikelove@pleco.com.
Best regards,
Michael Love
Founder & President
Pleco Software
http://www.pleco.com
From mikelove at pleco.com Tue Nov 11 22:49:02 2008
From: mikelove at pleco.com (Michael Love)
Date: Tue Nov 11 22:49:05 2008
Subject: [Pleco Software] Pleco 2.0 Released!
Message-ID: <491A603E.2060106@pleco.com>
NOTE: you're receiving this message because you signed up to receive
product announcements from Pleco Software. If you prefer not to receive
emails like this from us in the future, send a blank email to
"pleco-announce-unsubscribe@pleco.com", or visit
http://www.pleco.com/company.html , enter your email address in the
blank next to "Unsubscribe" under "Mailing List, and click the
"Unsubscribe" button.
Greetings,
After two-and-a-half years in development and many many delays, I'm
pleased to announce that the latest version of our Chinese dictionary
software, Pleco 2.0, is finally available for Palm OS and Windows
Mobile. (an iPhone version is also in development; see below for more on
that)
Pleco 2.0 boasts an enormous number of new features, including audio
pronunciation of dictionary headwords, stroke order diagrams, a built-in
document reader, full-text search, much better cross-referencing, and a
completely rewritten flashcard system with lots of new test types and
new ways to organize cards. We've also made a lot of under-the-hood
improvements, like ARM-accelerated code for faster performance on Palm
and a new font system for more compatible / less buggy Chinese text
rendering on Windows Mobile.
We're also selling three new dictionaries along with Pleco 2.0: the
"21st Century" English-Chinese Dictionary, which at 280,000 entries is
more than 10x larger than the NWP English-Chinese (though it doesn't
include Pinyin), the "Tuttle Learner's" Chinese-English Dictionary, a
beginner-oriented dictionary with detailed explanations and lots of
example sentences, and the "Xiandai Hanyu Guifan Cidian," our first ever
Chinese-Chinese dictionary and a really wonderful reference work in general.
PRICING / UPGRADES
Most of Pleco 2.0 is available as a free upgrade to anyone who owns
version 1.0; the only parts of 2.0 left out of the free upgrade are the
new dictionaries, stroke order diagrams, and audio pronunciation, though
the latter two are free for anyone who bought the Professional or
Complete version of PlecoDict after July 1st of 2006. The upgrade guide
in the instruction manual at
http://www.pleco.com/manual/upgradeguide.html has an easy step-by-step
guide to upgrading to Pleco 2.0, including instructions for converting
your flashcards to the new format; basically you just download and
install the new version from http://www.pleco.com/downloads.html and
then go to the "My Orders" page at http://www.pleco.com/orders.html to
activate it and receive a new keyfile.
(if our website looks weird / distorted when you load it, just click
your browser's Refresh / Reload button and that should clear it up)
The Xiandai Hanyu Guifan Cidian and 21st Century English-Chinese
Dictionary upgrades are priced at US $59.95 each; we also offer the two
of them bundled together $79.95. The Tuttle Learner's dictionary costs
$29.95.
If you didn't receive the stroke order / audio modules as a free
upgrade, you can purchase the stroke order one for $14.95, the audio one
for $19.95 or both together for $29.95; customers who bought the Basic
version of Pleco after that July 1st 2006 cutoff date can get the two
modules together for only $9.95.
Finally, you can get the Guifan Cidian / 21st Century dictionary
upgrades along with the stroke order / audio modules for a grand total
of $99.95.
Along with the release of Pleco 2.0, we're also making version 1.0
available on Palm OS only (and without a free upgrade to 2.0) at roughly
a 30% discount, with the option to upgrade to 2.0 later for just the
difference in price; we're hoping this will make our software affordable
for a larger number of people, particularly as the prices of used Palm
OS handhelds continue to drop.
WHY IT TOOK SO LONG
There are a number of reasons why it's taken us so much longer than we
expected to get Pleco 2.0 ready.
The biggest one is what people in the software industry call "feature
creep" - we tried to do far too many things in just one update, when in
hindsight we would have been better off spreading them out between three
or four different releases. Adding too much new code to a project at
once increases the odds of one piece of code conflicting with another,
and in the case of 2.0 we added so much new stuff that we ended up
spending as much time getting it all working together as we would have
if we'd written a brand new program from scratch. This had even more of
an impact on the debugging than initial programming, which is why Pleco
2.0 has theoretically been in "beta testing" for more than a year now -
most of the new features have been in place for a long time, but it's
taken a ton of work to get them actually working reliably.
Another reason, unfortunately, is our continued support for Palm OS.
Many of the things we wanted to in Pleco 2.0 were incredibly difficult
to do on Palm given its many technical limitations, and while we
eventually did find ways to implement all of them, it took us a really
really long time. When we started working on 2.0 back in the spring of
2006, continuing to fully support (and even encourage customers to buy)
Palm devices seemed like a sensible business move; a new version of Palm
OS was supposedly on the way, Treos were among the best smartphones you
could buy and the competition was comparatively weak. Now, however,
between HTC's increasingly-polished Windows Mobile phones, the rise of
BlackBerry among non-business users, Google Android, and, of course,
iPhone (which wasn't even announced until January of '07 and only
started supporting third-party software a few months ago), along with
the fact that Palm hasn't released a significant software update since
2004, Palm OS starts to look less and less attractive as a platform for
Pleco.
So our biggest remaining reason for supporting Palm is the large number
of Pleco users who already own Palm OS devices; if not for that
installed base, we probably would have dropped Palm support halfway
through developing 2.0, but abandoning our loyal customers would be a
terrible business move even if we didn't sell a single new copy of 2.0
on Palm. Having gone to all of this effort, we certainly aren't planning
to immediately stop supporting Palm either, and all of the 2.0.x bug
fixes / minor updates should be available on Palm as well as on Windows
Mobile. Major updates, however, are a different story; Pleco 2.1 is
about 50-50 to appear on Palm and Pleco 3.0 most likely will not. Given
how long it takes us to put out new releases, it's unlikely you'll
actually see the impact of this for quite a while, but nonetheless, if
you currently own a Palm OS handheld / smartphone, you might want to
consider switching to Windows Mobile the next time you upgrade, at least
if you'd like to continue using the latest versions of Pleco. (you can
switch from the Palm OS to the Windows Mobile version of Pleco
free-of-charge in most cases)
THANKS
Pleco 2.0 has been a team effort, not just by people actually working
for Pleco but by our customers as well, and I want to take a moment to
especially thank the hundred or so Pleco users who've helped us out by
beta-testing 2.0 and submitting feedback and bug reports; there's no way
this product could be anything close to what it is without all of your
efforts, and I hope every time you fire up 2.0 you derive some pride and
satisfaction from having played so big a role in helping to create it.
Thanks also to everyone else who's submitted feedback and bug reports
over the years; we've gotten where we are today by listening to our
customers, but the biggest reason that strategy has worked so well is
because we have such wonderful customers, and without your ideas,
insights and occasional nagging Pleco would be far less useful than it is.
Thanks, finally, to everyone who bought version 1.0, and especially
those of you who've recommended it to others - many of the new features
in 2.0 have cost a great deal of money to develop and license, and the
reason we were able to afford them (and to spend as long as we have
debugging / refining / getting everything working just right) is because
of all of you.
WHAT'S NEXT / IPHONE
The next announcement email you get from us will probably be about Pleco
2.0.1, which along with fixing any bugs we find in 2.0.0 should also
hopefully come with at least one more new dictionary (and possibly two);
we've licensed a Traditional Chinese Medical dictionary (Nigel Wiseman's
"Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine") which we know a lot of
people are eager to see released, and there are a couple of other titles
in the pipeline as well. There'll most likely be a 2.0.2/2.0.3/etc at
some point in the not too distant future too.
The next major project we're working on is an iPhone / iPod Touch
version of Pleco; after our experience with repeatedly missing release
dates for 2.0, we're not going to be saying anything about them for
iPhone (seriously; if you write us the day before it's released we'll
probably still tell you we have no idea when it's going to be ready),
and thanks to Apple's software approval requirements we can't say
anything definitive about pricing / upgrade policies yet either, so
about all I can tell you is that all but one of our dictionary licenses
(including the ABC) already cover iPhone, which means it should at least
be possible for us to bring over almost all of the features from the
Palm / WM versions; we're not yet certain about which features we
actually will put in the iPhone version, though, and some things may get
cut out at least initially to save time (or because we can't come up
with a good way to adapt them to an iPhone's interface).
We're also planning a desktop version of Pleco for both Windows and Mac
OS X, and most of our licenses (including the all-important handwriting
recognizer) will carry over to that as well - there's some possibility
we might be releasing a "preview version" of that for Windows in the
not-too-distant future (which would basically just be the Windows Mobile
version recompiled to work on desktop Windows but without any added
features), but the "real" desktop version likely won't be out until
after the iPhone one.
And we're also working on a lot of new features for our current
software, of course - we've just recently licensed a new data set that
should let us add some interesting new stuff involving character
components (multi-radical search etc), we've got some exciting ideas
about grammar and example sentences, and there are all sorts of
refinements and improvements to make to the things we've just added in
2.0 (the beta-test alone has generated a couple of hundred suggestions),
so we're not going to be running out of projects anytime soon.
As always, we welcome your feedback / bug reports / complaints / feature
suggestions; you can send them to me at mikelove@pleco.com.
Best regards,
Michael Love
Founder & President
Pleco Software
http://www.pleco.com