Fwd: Pleco Newsletter (August 2017)
Kerim Friedman
From: Michael Love <mike...@pleco.com>
Date: Sat, Aug 26, 2017 at 3:25 AM
Subject: Pleco Newsletter (August 2017)
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Greetings,
Apologies for the long delay (almost 3 years) since the last one of these - have been distracted by many many other things (both Pleco work and having two young kids) but am going to try to get back into the habit of sending out regular newsletters again (hopefully a few per year).
Table of Contents
1. Recent New Product Releases
a) Outlier Mini 1.1
b) Military Mandarin Lexicon
c) ABC Cantonese Dictionary (+ Wenlin dictionary wiki)
d) New Century E-C
e) New TTS voices
f) New PLC
g) CC-Canto
2. Recent New Features
3. iOS 11 + Android O
4. 4.0 Status Update
a) Request: flashcard (and user dictionary) database backups
5. Desktop / web / etc
6. Name Change
1. Recent New Product Releases
Though it's been a while since a major app update, we've quietly launched a bunch of exciting new add-ons in the last half year; all of these are available through the "Add-ons" screen in our iOS + Android apps (under New Releases).
a) Outlier Mini 1.1
After a few unfortunate delays / setbacks, the amazing new Outlier Dictionary of Chinese Characters - an in-depth C-E dictionary of Chinese character etymology - is finally moving forward; they launched their first 'mini' release of the dictionary a few months ago and have now followed that up with this major update adding a lot of new content.
Outlier Mini is free for anyone who backed their Kickstarter (at a level that would entitle you to a copy of the finished dictionary); it's also free if you pre-order the eventual Essentials or Expert editions on their website (outlier-linguistics.com). You can also buy just the Mini edition for $9.99 from their website or from the "Add-ons" screen in our app, with that amount applied as a credit towards a future purchase of the full Essentials or Expert edition once those are available.
b) Military Mandarin Lexicon
This is a brand new (and currently exclusive to Pleco) Chinese-English dictionary of PRC/PLA military terminology. It was made by a couple of military linguists, and is designed to work as a serious professional tool (extensively tagged and indexed; do a full-text search for #NTC, #SYMR, #NWMA, #81GA or #Diplo and the relevant entries will pop up), but it's very reasonably priced at $9.99 and so also quite useful for anyone with a casual interest in China's military; if you want a quick clear English explanation of the Three Obstacles or Campaignology or simply want help deciphering military-related Chinese newspaper articles, it's a great resource. See their website at junyu.org for many more details + screenshots.
c) ABC Cantonese Dictionary (+ Wenlin dictionary wiki)
Another brand new title, this is the first major Cantonese-to-English dictionary released in several decades, edited by Robert S. Bauer of HKU and produced by our good friends at Wenlin Institute. It features 15,000 Cantonese-specific vocabulary entries and a whopping 16,000 Cantonese example sentences, all with Jyutping/Yale pronunciation. Cost for this one is $29.99 but if you're interested in Cantonese it's well worth it.
This title is also available as a web-based dictionary from Wenlin at wenlinshangdian.com; they've also put the ABC Chinese-English and English-Chinese dictionaries on the web (part of the same subscription), and they're offering a very generous 45-day free trial right now (also a great way to evaluate whether you'd like to buy those dictionaries in Pleco :-), so if you're a fan of Wenlin or of the ABC dictionaries it's well worth checking out.
d) New Century E-C
This one's from last year, but since I never got around to including it in an announcement email: we recently released a massive new English-Chinese dictionary add-on, the New Century English-Chinese Dictionary 《新世纪英汉大词典》 from Collins + 外研社. It’s available for $29.99 and has also replaced the (unrelated) 21st Century E-C dictionary in our Professional bundle for new purchasers.
This is a brand new English-to-Chinese dictionary – published in 2016 – and contains a whopping 240,000 entries, making it comparable in size / scope to 21st Century. It also features 130,000 example sentences, the most of any single C-E or E-C dictionary we’ve ever offered (by comparison, 21C has about 50,000, our built-in PLC dictionary has 63,000, and ABC C-E has about 18,000). It also includes helpful English sense discriminators to let you quickly find the specific English sense of a word like “air” or “narrow” that you want to convey in Chinese. And as the product of a Sino-British joint venture it excels both at English (with comprehensive coverage of words and their senses, based on the authoritative Collins corpus) and Chinese (with good accurate idiomatic translations).
As with all E-C dictionaries of this size/scale, there’s no Pinyin, but you can easily look up the Pinyin for individual words in entries by tapping, and as with all of our dictionaries you can hear example sentences read out loud by tapping on the speaker icons next to them.
e) New TTS Voices
We also recently launched five new text-to-speech voices, to go along with our two existing ones (Hui and Liang); there are two new Mandarin voices (Hong and Qiang), a new female Taiwan Mandarin voice (Yafang), and two new Cantonese voices (Kaho and Kayan). These can be purchased for $10 each or you can get all five in a bundle for $25; also, if you've already purchased one of our recorded Cantonese audio add-ons you can get the corresponding Cantonese TTS voice for $5 (so you're basically getting a credit for the $5 you paid for the recorded voice).
f) New PLC
We recently updated our built-in PLC dictionary with support for parts of speech along with a whole lot of corrections / bug fixes and tens of thousands of new entries and example sentences. However, due to download size limitations we were only able to push this update automatically on Android; if we updated it in our iOS app it would push us over Apple's 100 MB limit for non-WiFi downloads (which would have disastrous effects on our business).
So if you're an Android user, congratulations, you already have the new PLC dictionary; if you're an iOS user, to get the new version of PLC (for free) just go into the "Add-ons" screen / Dictionaries / All Free and download "New PLC Beta" from there. We've heavily reworked our file format for our next major update 4.0 to make dictionaries a lot smaller (by about half), so we plan to ship this dictionary built-in on iOS as of that update, but in the meantime this seems like a relatively easy workaround.
g) CC-Canto
This was a while ago, but we also now offer an open-source Cantonese-to-English dictionary in Pleco that we developed ourselves, CC-Canto; can download it for free in 'Add-ons' and we've also given it its own little website (our first attempt at a web-based dictionary) at cantonese.org.
2. Recent New Features
Some assorted new features from recent updates that you might have missed.
Both platforms:
- New experimental Kai-style (more calligraphic font) stroke order diagrams, available as a free download in Add-ons / Features if you already own our regular stroke order add-on.
- More generous free demo version of our stroke order add-on, with several hundred common characters now available for free instead of just a few random demo characters.
- Added a brand new search filtering feature for Chinese searches (characters + pronunciation included); to use it, just put a # followed by an English word (or phrase) after the Chinese portion of your search. This will filter the results to only include entries in which that English word / phrase appears. For example, “gao#tall” will return only characters pronounced “gao” with “tall” in their definitions.
iOS:
- Beta of some aspects of the revamped OCR system that's coming in 4.0; enable this in Settings / OCR ("New OCR System") to try it out. We’ve moved to a totally new system for motion detection that should make OCR much, much less “jittery” than it was before; we also now retain + show you the last recognized video frame when you pause, and we let you go back through the last few frames with new history buttons at the top of the screen.
- Speech recognition support (requires iOS 10); tap the 'vox' button above the keyboard.
- New option in Settings / Search Interface to monitor the clipboard for changes on an iPad in Split View / Slide Over mode and update the text in the search box when they happen.
- Added an “Alternate Fonts” section to the CHARS tab to let you quickly see a character in all of your purchased alternative fonts. (tap on one of the characters here to view it fullscreen)
- 3D touch shortcuts for those of you with iPhone 6s'es or 7's; hard-press our app's icon to pop up the list, you can also customize it in Settings / Miscellaneous with a bunch of useful options like "OCR Last Screenshot."
Android:
- AnkiDroid integration (Settings / Flashcards), via their new API; can add cards from Pleco directly to AnkiDroid and also check for duplicates against your AnkiDroid deck, with the ability to customize field mappings separately for each Anki model if you have multiple models.
- Screen Reader (this one's almost 2 years old but quite a few people still don't seem to know about it), letting you look up words in any app just by tapping; enable that via the Screen Reader item in the sidebar menu.
- Quick Settings Tile support on Android 7 for easy toggling of Screen Reader, clipboard monitoring, and other Pleco features.
3. iOS 11 + Android O
Our current apps seem to work fine on the betas both of these but we're certainly planning around their future potential too.
iOS 11's biggest new feature for us is the widely-covered ARKit augmented reality API; we're still thinking about how best to integrate this with our OCR system (and finding out what's going on with 3D camera hardware in the iPhone 8 will help inform that decision), but as you can imagine we've already got enough ideas for about 5 years worth of app updates :-) They've also added some new iPad UI features - most notably drag-and-drop - that we're eager to support, and we're also planning a modest UI refresh with a move back towards more solid icons and possibly also a switch away from the drawer menu if we can come up with a good alternative.
Android O's biggest new feature is that the Android accessibility APIs we use for Screen Reader added support for finding the exact locations of individual characters on the screen; at the moment support for it in other apps is spotty (doesn't work on web pages) but as support improves it could translate to some pretty significant benefits for Screen Reader.
4. 4.0 Status Update
Things are finally really coming together on our long-awaited 4.0 update (and its even longer-awaited flashcard revamp); the core of the new flashcard system is now designed + implemented + working well and much of the remaining work consists of polishing the settings / UI / etc to the point where they might actually make sense to the average user.
We'll be revealing many more details soon - and thanks to Apple recently raising their beta tester limit to 10,000, pretty much anybody interested in trying the beta of 4.0 should be able to do so - but in terms of basic philosophy, what we've essentially done with flashcards is build a "system for building flashcard systems" and then layered a variety of simple configuration profiles on top of it.
Internally, everything is broken up into a series of stages and rules; a particular test type now looks kind of like an old BASIC program (correct answer or tap this button -> go to step X, etc), and any time you answer a card it's run through a series of rules to determine its upcoming interval / stage / available test types / etc. We plan to make all of that functionality fully customizable for people who want to dive into it, so if you think Anki is the epitome of flashcard algorithmic excellence you can rip off its algorithm more-or-less exactly in Pleco, but you can also do that for half a dozen other flashcard programs (and if you find a particular arcane sort of calculation isn't supported by our system, it's quite easy to extend + there's a very good chance we can add it for you).
However, the default system is most likely going to be a good bit simpler / easier to understand than most of our flashcard competition; recent studies + our own experience have led us to the conclusion that precisely calculating study intervals by card difficulty does more harm than good (in that it forces compromises in other areas like giving people sensible numbers of cards to study on a particular day), so at least in our current design the default system is going to be almost embarrassingly minimal; a series of fixed 'steps' (minutes and then days) followed by a 'long-term memory' mode where we basically fill in surplus review time with reviews of old cards but don't particularly worry about whether card X is due for review again in 200 or 300 or 400 days. So you'll finally get the long-requested ability to have SRS plus a limit to the number of cards you study each day, but you'll get it in a way that doesn't really compromise recall.
This has been a long time coming - we've been talking about revamping the flashcard system pretty much since the day we started beta-testing our last major revamp to it, in 2007 - but we haven't actually been working on 4.0 for anything like 10 years; it's been more like 2, after spending the previous 8 making various little false starts on it only to have something else bubble up to the top of our priority queue. The arrival of iOS / Android and the modern mobile software industry has sadly taken a lot of the control over our schedule out of our hands, and nowadays we spend as much time dealing with the consequences of decisions made at Apple and Google as we do working on our own new ideas. (so even those 2 years have only included about 1 year's worth of actual work on 4.0)
The fact that we've finally gotten something done on 4.0 is as much a result of Google / Apple slowing down the pace of major updates as it is of us finally getting organized to do it - Apple's last break-everything-and-watch-developers-cry update was iOS 8 in 2014 and Google's was Android Marshmallow in 2015 so we've had a period of relative stability since then to focus on 4.0.
To give you some idea, here's a rough timeline of the last decade of Pleco development:
2007: beta of Pleco 2.0 for Palm / Windows Mobile with new (and at the time, quite innovative!) flashcard system
2008: release 2.0 on Palm/WM, begin frantically porting to iPhone after Apple launches iPhone SDK in March
2009: continue porting to iPhone, redesign around in-app purchases when Apple announces those in the spring for iPhone OS 3 (and a second time in fall when they start allowing them in free apps) and release at end of year without flashcards
2010: port old flashcard system to iOS (initial app shipped without any flashcards), fix other major design mistakes from initial release, develop + release OCR based on new camera API in iPhone OS 4
2011: revamp OCR with motion detection + begin porting Pleco to Android, thanks to Google's introduction of in-app purchasing support in March
2012: release Android port, spend half a year fixing major design mistakes from initial release, begin work on 3.0
2013: have baby, heavily redesign 3.0 based on summer launch of iOS 7, release 3.0 on iOS at end of year
2014: fix some major 3.0 design issues on iOS and port to + release on Android
2015: second major Android revamp for Material Design, have another baby, begin work on 4.0
2016: continue work on 4.0 (and keep up with iOS / Android system updates)
2017: continue work on 4.0
So it's been a busy 10 years (even if relatively short on flashcard updates), but we're optimistic that 4.0 will be worth the very long wait.
a) Request: flashcard (and user dictionary) database backups
4.0 is introducing a brand new flashcard database format, and so we have to develop an in-app converter to migrate data from the old format to the new one. To make sure we get that right, we'd really appreciate it if some heavy flashcard users could share their Pleco flashcard database backups with us so that we can test them with this converter. (benefit to you is that then you can be pretty confident that they'll work correctly even in the first beta) User dictionary databases are also appreciated - those two formats are actually converging in 4.0 (a user dictionary will basically just be a flashcard database without any study history in it - also means that custom flashcards are now also dictionary entries).
5. Desktop / web / etc
First off: still no plans to do anything on Windows. We're too busy with other stuff (as you can see above) and the market just isn't big enough, strange though that feels to say as someone who used a Mac in the '90s :-) Further hurting matters is the fact that there simply aren't very many people out there who would pay full price to use Pleco on a desktop; a lot of our customers might find it useful, but not to the point of buying all of their dictionaries etc again (best we could hope for is a modest 'upgrade fee' that wouldn't cover our porting costs), and very few people who don't own Pleco now would buy it just to use it on Windows.
A Mac port would be considerably easier, since it shares a lot of APIs with iOS, but candidly, we don't think macOS has much of a future, particularly not in the wake of iOS 11 (with its aggressive introduction of desktop-like features on iPad), and the market for that is even smaller than Windows.
Our Android app actually works pretty well on Android emulators on Mac and Windows, and even better on Chromebooks, so those are an option to consider if you really want a copy of Pleco on your desktop, but we're unlikely to release a native desktop app anytime soon.
We are considering the possibility of a web version of Pleco, which would help desktop users and also enable some new functionality within our apps (better sync / data backup support, live updates to dictionaries, etc) but we aren't ready to announce anything specific on that yet. If we did launch it our tentative plan would be to make some portion of it free (e.g. access to searches of dictionaries you'd already purchased) but other portions (resource-intensive data sync / backup e.g.) an inexpensive paid subscription.
6. Name Change
Small change, but we've now dropped the "Software" and changed our company name to "Pleco Inc."; this reflects the fact that we're now taking on more of the roles of a traditional publisher, working directly with authors to distribute their content in Pleco, rather than simply converting somebody else's print titles; keeping 'software' in our name makes about as much sense as a traditionally-print publisher putting 'paper' or 'printing' in theirs.
Thanks for all of your support / feedback / word-of-mouth / etc over the years; I am sorry for the infrequent pace of these updates but am going to try very hard to send at least a couple per year going forward.
Best,
Michael Love
Pleco Inc.
pleco.com
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Associate ProfessorThe Department of Ethnic Relations and CulturesCollege of Indigenous StudiesNational DongHwa University, TAIWAN副教授國立東華大學族群關係與文化學系