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First off: our long-awaited big iOS update is finally about ready for beta-testing. (whew!)
So, if you're interested in getting early access to (and helping us find bugs in) the long-awaited next major version of Pleco on iOS, please send an email to iphonebeta@pleco.com with the following information:
To be considered, please contact us no later than July 1st. If you're accepted, we'll contact you a few days after that to give you a registration link (we're using a service called TestFlight to make the beta installation process a bit more painless). We expect to actually begin testing in early August, but we're putting out a call for beta testers now because our iTunes developer account renews in mid-July and we have a lot of extra device testing slots (which we hoarded all year in anticipation of this beta) that will expire if we don't use them by then.
For those of you who don't follow technology news too closely, iOS 7 is the big new release of iOS that Apple announced at their developer conference in San Francisco two weeks ago. (see this page for a preview) Its centerpiece feature is a totally overhauled user interface design, one that emphasizes clean styling and beautiful typography. This is actually a direction that we've been heading anyway, so we think our new update will work amazingly well on it, but we're going to be working very hard between now and then to make sure that it does.
As I just mentioned, we plan to start beta-testing our big iOS update in early August; from there we plan to basically continue testing right up until the first day that Apple releases the finished version of iOS 7 to developers and allows us to start submitting apps that run on it. At that point, assuming the app is relatively stable and bug-free we plan to immediately submit it, in the hopes that it will then be available on the App Store at the same time that iOS 7 is released to the general public. (given the state of the current iOS 7 developer preview, our best guess is that that will happen sometime in mid-October)
This does not mean that the update will require iOS 7, incidentally, only that we'll be optimizing our user interface design around it - iOS users tend to update OSes very quickly, so soon after iOS 7 is released it's likely that the majority of our customers will be running it, and if history is any guide, by next summer there'll be hardly anyone left on iOS 6. So we plan to make the minimum system requirement for the update iOS 6.1, then switch to iOS-7-only sometime in early 2013. (a few specific new features may be iOS-7-only from the get-go, though)
As far as other aspects of the update: the feature list has changed relatively little since my last announcement email, but I can now confirm that Cantonese support (display, search, and audio) is fully implemented, and that our new type design is also implemented and looks spectacular. (you can see a few screenshots on our Facebook page and discussion forums) We've switched to a slide-out sidebar for navigation, as seen in Facebook / Path / Gmail / et al, getting rid of all of that confusing "OCR+Read+Help" business. Searches now aggregate results from all of your installed dictionaries, and the definition display screen now gives you every dictionary's definition in a single scrolling box rather than requiring you to cycle through them all with button presses. There's also a very cool new feature which aggregates every example sentence from every dictionary containing a particular word (even if it's not the headword).
We've also developed a new flashcard database syncing system, one that's hosted on our own servers and not tied to iCloud or any other third-party service. Along with avoiding iCloud's various bugs / quirks, this has the added benefit of letting us support Android, and potentially even cross-platform sync between Android and iOS devices. Plus we can build on it in the future to offer stuff like web-based flashcard list import and editing. We can't absolutely promise this will be included the big update yet, since while it seems to be working well we're pretty new to web services and might encounter some unanticipated problems during the beta that force us to delay it, but since most of those problems would be on the server side (and hence fixable without updating our app), we would probably still include it in the app and just call that particular feature a "beta" until we're satisfied with it.
Anyway, this update has taken way longer than it should have - never again will we try to cram this much stuff into one new release - but it's looking really good and we're very excited to finally get it into our users' hands.
A reminder / request: if you're a paying user of Pleco on iOS, please, please, go into the "Settings" screen, write down the Registration ID that appears at the top, and keep it in a safe place somewhere. Alternatively, go to pleco.com/orders.html and fill out the form to register your purchase with your email address and we'll keep a record of that association on our server.
Our customers often lose access to their Apple accounts and need help restoring Pleco, or replace their iPhone with an Android phone without keeping the iPhone around and want to transfer their copy of Pleco to Android, or simply find that Apple has for whatever reason lost all record of their Pleco purchases and won't re-deliver them via the in-app "Restore Purchases" command. Because Apple anonymizes all orders, it's actually quite difficult for us to find a purchase in our system to allow us to help in a case like that. But your Registration ID will give us all of the information we need, so as long as you keep a record of that somewhere, if you ever find yourself in the unfortunate position of losing access to your Pleco purchases you'll have a reliable way to get them back.
Google does not anonymize orders, so a similar problem does not generally exist on Android - all Google Play developers have access to the contact information of everyone who buys an app or add-on from them. (whether or not you consider that a good thing is up to you - certainly helps us with customer support anyway) Of course that also applies to orders made through our own online store. However, Amazon does anonymize orders placed through the Amazon AppStore, so if you bought a Pleco add-on from there you should probably write down your Registration ID too.
After a recent discussion with App Review, we are now able to offer customers who can't buy our iOS software from Apple (due to iTunes errors / account issues / etc) the ability to buy it directly from us instead. We don't support this in our online store yet, and may not for several months, but if you or somebody else you know is having difficulty purchasing Pleco for iOS and would like to buy it directly from us, contact sales@pleco.com and we'll be happy to arrange it.
We've just released a major new dictionary add-on, the "Grand dictionnaire Ricci de la langue chinoise." This is an extremely comprehensive Chinese-to-French dictionary with over 300,000 entries and plentiful historical data for scholars; the Chinese-French aspect of it limits its mass appeal a bit, but for connoisseurs of Chinese dictionaries this is easily one of the best ever developed.
There's a rather interesting story behind this title - development involved 300 people and took more than five decades, much of the work being done on paper index cards. It's an amazing dictionary, and we're hoping that the combination of our release and a forthcoming web version might help increase its popularity to the point where it starts to become commercially feasible to consider an English translation.
This release does not include the historical character images from the print/CD-ROM editions, but those should be coming soon (once we get our software to support embedded images in entries). It's also missing / can't render properly a few other rare characters - again, we're working on it. But in all other respects it should have pretty much the same data as the other editions of GR. And unlike those other editions, it includes simplified characters along with traditional for every entry.
We're also considering adding an embedded French-to-English dictionary just to enable English-speaking users to more easily translate French words in Grand Ricci entries, but we don't have a specific release date for that yet.
Anyway, Grand Ricci is available right now as an in-app purchase in our iOS and Android apps, so if this interests you you can both try it out and buy it today.
This is certainly not the last exciting new dictionary we're working on, by the way, or even the last exciting new historical linguistic dictionary - lots more titles in the pipeline.
If you haven't been to our redesigned website yet, you can check that out at www.pleco.com; along with an updated look, our online store has been totally rewritten to be much more efficient and (we hope) easy to use, and our discussion forums were likewise updated to use a newer and nicer forum software package. We've also finally put up a FAQ section in the Support page, which we plan to expand considerably in the future.
Not much new to say regarding Android, though we did just release a bug-fix update (2.4.11) if you haven't installed that yet. (it added a new permission requirement, so it'll show up as "manual update only" in My Apps on Google Play)
Some recent announcements about anti-aliasing algorithms have made us hopeful that Google will finally improve Android's font rendering in their next Android update, which would enable us to introduce our new type design in our Android app as well, but in the meantime, the other new features we're working on on iOS should show up on Android as well in the near future.
Apple now seems to have settled on a course of not merging iOS and Mac OS together after all, so while we still don't have any official plans in this regard, we can say that we are seriously considering developing a version of Pleco for Mac OS. (which though a separate platform has a tremendous amount of similarity to iOS coding-wise)
We would probably time this to coincide with the release of Mac OS 10.10, which we expect to be released in Fall of 2014 and to embrace a lot of the new UI concepts that Apple recently announced for iOS 7 - this would make porting much easier, since we'd be able to keep a lot of the same design / icons / etc, and it would also come at a time when Retina Displays (around which our new type design is optimized) are much more common on Macs, further streamlining things.
Since we'd prefer to avoid a whole lot of "is it ready yet?" emails, though, it's likely that we'll continue to be "seriously considering" a Mac OS version right up until we actually release it.
We still have no plans to bring Pleco to Windows Phone, or to any other version of Windows.
The main reason for this is simply that it's too much work: we're a small company and we don't really have the resources to simultaneously develop Pleco on three totally different platforms. In fact, it's straining our limits to even support two, given the rapid pace of mobile OS evolution - we spend a great deal of time every year simply updating our software to work with the latest versions of iOS and Android.
The "too much work" issue has also gotten somewhat personal for me now, as I'm the proud father of a 4-month-old baby girl: porting Pleco to Windows is yet another complicated new project I'd have to supervise (even if most of the actual programming were farmed out to a third party), which means less time to spend with her. So even an extremely compelling business argument in favor of supporting Windows would probably not suffice to overcome that personal argument against it.
Anyway, thanks for your continuing business / word-of-mouth / bug reports / feedback, and as always you can direct further examples of the latter two to me at mikelove@pleco.com.
Michael Love
Pleco Software
www.pleco.com
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