If you’ve downloaded the latest version of the Lingopal apps, you’ll notice a few changes. Some of the changes have come directly from requests you have made. Others are things we’ve had in the pipeline for a while, and give a hint to the future of Lingopal. So let’s go through them.

Manage Categories

This lets you do a few things. One is Adding New Categories. So if you have a specific need for a bunch of phrases which aren’t already in the app, then you can create a new category and put the phrases in there. Our premium apps let you add as many categories as you want.

You’ll notice a padlock to the right of the ‘+’. This represents a Parental Control feature many of you have been requesting. Input a PIN code of your choosing, and you’ll next notice that all of the categories have a checkbox to their right. By default, all the categories will show pre-selected, but if you don’t want to see any categories, then just uncheck them, and lock the padlock by re-entering the PIN. Now those categories are hidden from you, and only your PIN can unlock them.
Manage Phrases

You’ll find a ‘Manage Phrases’ button at the bottom of each category. It works in a very similar fashion to the Manage Categories feature, in that you can add new phrases and hide pre-existing ones.
One of the many reasons our customers like Lingopal is because they can use the app offline. That’s still the case, but adding a phrase now employs an automatic translation feature, and that requires internet access. However, once you’ve done it, it’s saved and you don’t need to keep on using internet access.

Make your own phrases, automatically translate and add recording

Send us your phrases!
Like all the other Lingopal phrases, you can send any new phrases that you’ve created to your friends via email, Facebook and Twitter. Now, you can also send them to us. We want to grow Lingopal with more phrases, categories and languages. And we figured that the best way of capturing the real way people speak is to do it via crowd-sourcing. Capturing content like this is the first step – we’ve got some pretty cool plans in the pipeline to enhance this and return the content to you. Keep watching!

We’re pretty excited about the latest version of Lingopal for iPhone, which is in the process of getting released in iTunes right now. Here’s an overview of the major changes.

1. PHONETICS

This is something a lot of you have been asking for quite a while. It’s difficult to try and dictate something when the foreign alphabet makes no sense to you whatsoever. For now, if your native language uses the Roman alphabet (or a close variation like Turkish) and the target language is non-Roman (e.g. Japanese, Korean, Russian), then we have provided phonetics. We’ve also got them in limited languages if your native language is Japanese, Korean or Russian.

Down the track, we will add more phonetics for other language pairings, but for now, the most popular ones are there.

Phonetics for major language pairings

2. COPY & PASTE

Not too much explanation required for this one …

Copy & Paste

3. VIRAL

This feature flows on from the Copy & Paste feature. There’s a phrase in Lingopal that you like, and you want to share it with friends. See in the image above the icon on the far right side with two arrows pointing out? Click that and you come to the screen below, which allows you to automatically share that phrase using Facebook, Twitter or email.

Share with friends

4. iAd - (only for Lite apps)

We constantly want to keep improving Lingopal and have some big plans to make sure it stays your favourite translation app (or becomes it ). That means ongoing development costs, and we’ve decided to start running ads over the Lite (free) versions to help pay for them. If you don’t like ads, then it’s a simple US$0.99 upgrade for the premium version, which not only includes hundreds of more phrases, but will never have ads.

What’s coming …

We’ve already started work on the next version of Lingopal, and this should be ready some time in January. We think it’ll be pretty cool …

ANDROID – we haven’t forgotten you guys! Everything we do on iPhone we want to do on Android. Unfortunately we don’t have as many Android developer resources as we do iPhone, so the Android updates are going to lag a little behind. You should be looking out for some updates in January too.

Cheers!

Yes, we now have Lingopal apps available in the Android Market, and already we have a few 5 star ratings which is pretty cool.

I must say I’ve been pretty impressed with the Android software. For one thing, it’s fast. You can zip around the Lingopal app very quickly. And it gets mail a heck of a lot quicker than my iPhone 3, but I suspect I might have a setting wrong somewhere.

Anyway, in terms of use, the Lingopal app is almost identical to the iPhone version. There are one or two differences though:

1) it hasn’t  got the playback speed adjustment feature yet. I put ‘yet’ in italics because the people at Android are getting a host of requests for development features and as soon as this one comes along, we’ll do an update.

2) The Categories, Settings, Favourites & Search work off a clickable Menu button, but that’s a feature common to all Android phones.

3) You won’t see Bengali, Hindi or Thai yet. Right now Android doesn’t support Bengali or Hindi text, but we expect they’ll change this soon – no-one’s going to ignore 1 billion people in India Thai is supported, but only on version 2.2 of Android, and who Google and the Telcos release this version too is in their hands, which kind of sucks. Anyway, we’ll be getting those versions out (and updating Lingopal 42 > Lingopal 44) when the OS is ready.

In the meantime, if you’ve got an Android phone, start downloading and spreading the word!

PS – right now we’re busy working away on some pretty nice updates for both iPhone & Android versions. Can’t wait to get them out!

Lingopal apps - available in the Android Market now

Lingopal’s Facebook page has recently featured in a Facebook consultant Aymeric Gaurat-Apelli’s blog as an example of how a business might successfully use Facebook Pages. First a disclaimer – we employed the services of Aymeric’s consultancy, so while it might look a bit like a mutual admiration society, our Facebook page has advanced in leaps and bounds since we acted on his advice.

As someone for whom social media is a little unnatural (wrong generation? – just), having a Facebook page gave me a sense of unease. What was I meant to post? How often? Why? What’s wrong with just the website? Can’t we just make an app like Farmville? What the hell is Farmville? These and many more questions had been swimming around my head for some time, to the point where I was getting an involuntary eye-twitch (actually that may have had something to do with a tempestuous Brazilian girl).

On the advice of a friend, I started reading Six Pixels of Separation, by Mitch Joel – that really helped in demystifying what social media is and how it works. It also made me realise how important it is to have a Facebook presence for Lingopal. That was all very well – anyone can have a Facebook presence – but how do you have a good, or great Facebook presence?

So I scoured the internet trying to track down really successful pages, and the guys who made them. There were reasons why some pages/apps got thousands, if not millions of followers (and I’m not talking about the huge multinational brands with budgets to match), and I wanted to be able to use that reasoning when it came time to make our Facebook page. And that led me to Aymeric, who, in an earlier career, was a successful Facebook developer.

Aymeric was able to assist not only in very practical terms (showing me how to edit code, create an FBML page, use graphics etc), but he also explained why we do things, and how users may be compelled to interact. He also (and this is pretty important to any business owner) explained why it made good sense to first experiment with some of the simplest and cheapest ways to use Facebook, rather than go off and develop a whizz-bang app which might fail.

We’re only starting out with just a few hundred followers, but now that I have a better understanding of what’s required and how I can efficiently do it, it’s not so much a chore but rather a fun challenge.

Astute observers of our new website will notice there is a link called ‘Android’. Yes, we are in the process of porting all our language apps over to Android. Last week a man from FedEx delivered an HTC Legend, quite a sleek little number with a 1-piece aluminium body. Overall I’m pretty impressed with the Android OS. It does things a little bit differently but for the most part it’s intuitive, and it’s certainly quite quick (my iPhone 3G is a laggard with the latest OS).

We hope to be releasing the first Android versions to the Android Market very soon. Here’s a sneak peak.

If you haven’t visited our website in a while, you might notice that it’s undergone a spruce-up. The last one still makes my toes curl, but in terms of a clean look, multi-language support, simplicity and a really easy back-end (yep, even I can do it), then this is a pretty good result. You’ll also notice there are feeds in the front page to our Facebook page and Twitter posts. Feel free to ‘like’ us (that sounds so clumsy) and follow the tweets (@lingopal).

On the subject of the Facebook page, this is something we really want to push. After launching it a few weeks ago, we’re gradually getting in some followers, and the stats show that they’re enjoying the Daily Diversions – interesting little language snippets from around the world. We’ve got some cool plans for Facebook in the future, but for now we need to get a critical mass of followers.

Here’s a typical post:

It’s been a while coming, but I was very happy to check my mail today and see this:

It wasn’t a simple process however. In fact, it took 4 separate attempts before they were accepted by Apple. And it had nothing to do with the binary. Rather, it was all in the description of the In App Purchase.

We deliberately designed the Lite apps not to be simply a cut down version of the premium apps, but to allow the easy upgrade path within the app. In effect, you always have the option, via a simple 2-step process, to pay and release all the premium content.

And that means having to describe what the user will be getting if they upgrade.

See that ’23 More Categories’? There’s a little box in the Apple submission system where I had to put that in. There’s a bigger box just below where I can put a more detailed description. Here’s what I originally inserted:

Little Box: All Categories Upgrade

Big Box: Upgrades Lingopal to include all 25 categories

And it got rejected. I thought I had written as accurately and simply as possible what purchasers would be getting. So I tried again, with a slight tweak for the Big Box content. It too got rejected.

You have to remember that this isn’t just a quick change, email it to Apple then they get back to you overnight. There’s a process and it takes days, if not weeks. While this was going on I was trying to get some guidance from Apple about what was and wasn’t permitted in the text. There are some guidelines, but I couldn’t see anything in them which suggested I was in breach of them. I was very fortunate to actually get someone from Apple on the phone (I bet there aren’t too many people who can claim that), and while Richard Chipman was very courteous and did his best to help, it was still very much a trial and error process.

Eventually, by writing ’23 More Categories’ and ‘Gives Lingopal 23 more categories and hundreds more phrases’, the apps got accepted.Perhaps Apple could provide some ore concise guidelines so developers don’t have to constantly poke around in the dark?

So this now means that people can download a Lite app for free – that’s all the languages plus Lingopal 44 – and get to play with the app, before deciding whether they want the extra content. As it stands it’s still a pretty useful app, and it’ll be interesting to watch how it gets taken up over the next few weeks and months.

Keep a lookout for a new update with a couple of fancy features very soon. In the meantime, all our Lingopal Lite apps can be found here (though curiously the Lingopal 44 Lite isn’t yet showing, though its status is ‘Ready for Sale’).

After four attempts (more on that soon) we’re happy to announce that the first of our Lite apps – Afrikaans – has been made available in the apps store. This means that you can ‘try before you buy’.

The Lite apps will still be fully functional, though limited to only 2 categories (Essential & Flirting). If that’s all you need, then bully for you. If you want a little more, then Apple’s In App Purchase trick let’s you upgrade to the Premium version in just a couple of simple steps.

As I mentioned earlier, it took quite a while to get approved, and now we’ve got the remaining Lite versions (including Lingopal 44) in review. We’re hoping they’ll be approved in the next couple of days.

Sound is a funny thing, and I am not even going to attempt to begin to explain its intricacies here. If you are interested in such things as sample rates and artifacting and normalisation then I suggest you read about them here. What I will say is this.

When we recorded all the sound files for the Lingopal apps, we used professional recording studios – the kind with the artist locked in a sound-proof booth – and recorded the files in the largest format possible, which are wave files. There may well be larger file formats around but this is an industry standard. The wave (or .wav) files would make any of our applications prohibitively enormous, so they had to be compressed.The trick is to compress them as much as possible, without  killing the quality of the sound. Unfortunately with every compression you’re going to do that to some extent.

Originally we compressed all the apps down pretty low to 16kbps. These have now been decompressed to 32kbps. That doesn’t mean the sound files are twice as good, or loud, but there is definitely an improvement. This is most noticeable when listening to the files with head-phones on, but it’s obvious with the iPhone speakers too. Unfortunately we’re limited by the capabilities of those speakers, but we think that, if and when Apple brings out a new iPhone with better speakers, then we’ll be well placed to take advantage of it.

In doing the builds we made a couple of errors. The Spanish and German languages had a lot of their sound files removed. They might look like this:

German & Spanish have plenty of sound missing - the fix is on its way!

Fortunately this was brought to our attention pretty quickly, and I’m happy to say that the corrected versions are on their way to the iTunes store now. Apologies to those who have been inconvenienced by it.

It seems there is quite a popular youth-oriented TV program called ‘We Got Married’, and from what I can gather, and I haven’t gathered much, two popular celebrities are paired together and pretend, mostly in front of guests, to be married.

In this episode, a young Afghan guy visits Ga-In from Brown Eyed Girls fame (a Korean pop group) and Jo Kwon, a Korean boy band, 2AM. In their efforts to speak to this fellow, who speaks English, Ga-In and Jo Kwon use Lingopal on Ga-In’s iPhone. Hilarity ensues! as the publicists would say.

It’s all here on the allkpop website.

That’s Ga-In on the right. Delightful.