The "Sorry, but I have to rave about Pleco" thread...

[sdl]

I spent more than $1,000 US on various handheld translators, including two of Ectaco's latest and greatest. Nothing but buyer's remorse over all of it - completely impractical and all too often counter-intuitive.

Enter PlecoDict (which I had never even heard of until a month ago, despite exhaustive searches), and now I'm flying like I've never flown before. mikelove, your product is truly amazing. I can't go anywhere without it now, and my learning curve for Chinese has taken off exponentially.

The fact that it's equally useful and intuitive for expats as well as Chinese is mind-blowing as well. 5 seconds of training time, and Chinese people are snatching my PALM TX out of my hand, anxious to communicate with me. They want to tell me something, I pull out the translator, point to the HWR square and say "Hanzi...yi ge...", and they immediately start scribbling away. Then I point at the recognition icon/symbol, which they tap, and without further guidance, they select their character and immediately start excitedly scribbling another.

To translate, I do a backwards thing, since the lookup sees the left most character, or combination. I just swipe away the left most to reveal the next word, and in a few swipes I have the gist of what they're trying to tell me.

I could go on and on, but no less than a dozen other expats and Chinese (over just the past two weeks) are now scouring Wuxi and Shanghai in search of a PALM TX, so that they can have one too. That has never happened with anything else I bought...not even the ScanEye Penpower handheld text scanner, which is good, and has been practical, and has impressed more than a few. Even then, nothing has come even close to the "I AM ABSOLUTELY SOLD ON THIS, WHERE DO I GET ONE?" factor the way PlecoDict has.

One English speaking Italian expat friend of mine, who has lived in China for more than 12 years, and speaks, reads and writes fluent Mandarin, was shocked that he'd never even heard of Pleco. "I thought I had seen everything, but I have NEVER seen anything this good. Nothing. Not in all my years in China. This is amazing." And now he's desperate to find a PALM TX as well - and only for that application.

Wish I'd known about this sooner. I've been living and working in China since January 2007, and doing very well with my language studies, in spite of the garbage I've bought that was supposed to help me with Chinese. But when I think about what PlecoDict has done for me in just one month, I know now that I've been floundering.

I swear, I've never had a product snatched out of my hand so many times. There's one club I go to where I know I have to say goodbye to my PALM for a while, as half dozen others scribble away on it, excited to have a communication barrier down.

As an aside: I was asked a couple of times if there was a cracked version of PlecoDict. Both times I made the person feel very small. "Not with software like this. Not with this much put into it. For the impact it will have on you, just pay the price. And don't skimp. Pay the $119, unlock it all, and enjoy with peace of mind what no other product in the world can do for you."

Oh yes. Way to go, Pleco. That's my rant, that's my rave. I hope you take it to the bank in a big way, because of all developers out their, you are among the very most deserving; both of word of mouth advertising, and of the highest praise.

 

[mikelove]

Thanks! This is wonderful to read, particularly when mired in the depths of 2.0 beta debugging. We actually haven't spent any design time thinking about how to improve the software for native Chinese speakers communicating with Pleco users by writing in characters, but it's something we should definitely look at for 2.1 - for example, a simple screen (maybe upside-down, if we can manage it) which displayed a big handwriting box along with a prompt in Chinese to write what you want to say one-character-at-a-time. Possibly combined with a tweak to the character-magnify feature that would bring up the Chinese translation of an English word in big characters which you could flash at someone you wanted to communicate with.

Sorry that it took you so long to find us, though; we really do need to do a better job of getting the word out. We'll be making a little progress on that with 2.0, since it'll be available through authorized retailers along with our website and the website will market it less as a Palm/PPC software add-on and more as a concept unto itself - a "Get Pleco" page written on the assumption that the reader has no idea what a Pocket PC is or how they might go about purchasing one, Google ads for keywords that have nothing to do with handhelds/PDAs, etc.

We've actually been very lucky about cracks, in spite of our glacially slow release schedule it usually seems that by the time someone cracks one of our products it's already out-of-date. One of the benefits of not being a household name like Microsoft or Adobe is that there's not really enough prestige in cracking your software to attract the interest of a top-tier hacker. Of course the close contact with our customers also helps, spending two hours on hold with Microsoft tech support could turn almost anyone into a criminal.

Anyway, I'm delighted to hear you're finding the software useful, many many thanks for the word-of-mouth advertising and best wishes for the new year,

--Michael Love

 

[hairyleprechaun]

Hello Mike,

I really have to second what sdl said. For me the experience was very similar in searching for almost a year online and in hundreds of brick-and-mortar electronic department stores, before I accidentally found out about Pleco from a classmate at Beida. I also ended up wasting nearly $500 on a Besta translator that was entirely useless for a non-native speaker of the language. And, as soon as I found Pleco, my language increased exponentially and all of my western and Chinese friends were always grabbing for my PDA.

You have got to get your advertising up to par with your programming!

Good luck, and thanks for everything!

Darrol

 

[mikelove]

Thanks! I suppose it's a testament to the quality of our products that we've managed to succeed in spite of being utterly inept at marketing, but that hardly excuses it - really something we need to try harder on in '08.

 

[ipsi]

Yeah. I only know about Pleco because I saw it mentioned on Chinese-Forums.com, and figured it looked interesting. Picked up a second-hand Tungsten E off Trademe, and was in love .

Not sure how you should go about marketing it... Maybe just start contacting Universities, and have them pass on information to their students? I dunno. If you do, make sure you contact Universities in and around the Asia/Oceania region. I'm sure there's plenty of ways to put out the word. Have you any ideas about/interest in acquiring customers who don't use the internet much, or even at all?

One of the things about close contact with your customers is that people then start to feel as though they're actually hurting a person, as opposed to a giant faceless corporation, which won't even notice one more copy being pirated. Whereas I suspect that every time a copy of Pleco is cracked, Mike would notice that, financially.

 

[mikelove]

Universities are definitely key, yes. This is a big part of the reason for our educational-discounts-only-through-schools policy, we're giving you a generous discount (which incidentally comes almost entirely out of our profits in most cases) but in exchange for that your teacher (or someone in your school's administration anyway) is being made aware of Pleco. Since we don't have the same justification for student discounts that Adobe et al do (hooking customers while they're young so that their employers will be stuck buying them those $1500 copies of Creative Suite for the next few decades), we pretty much need to get some other benefit in order to justify having them, but getting a teacher to mention the school Pleco discount to their Chinese classes at the start of the year is a pretty big benefit.

I don't see non-internet-users becoming a significant part of our customer base, it's unlikely they'd be willing to go to the trouble of setting up / syncing the software to their PDA. And yeah, someone cracking the latest version would definitely have a big impact on our sales. Pirated copies of our old Oxford Dict software still seem to be in circulation, actually, in spite of the fact that it won't even run on any current Palm model except the E2 - we get an e-mail every month or two with someone trying to enter a known pirate serial number and getting an error message, must be pretty legitimate-looking if they actually think they can e-mail us for tech support.