Last night I went to Walking Street in Pattaya. As its name suggests, it is a street only for walking, at least it is after 6pm.

Keeping the cars and motorcycles out allows for scenes like this.

As you would expect, there is plenty of alcohol on offer, and after a few hours, Walking Street looks a little like this.

What else is on offer? It all depends on what takes your fancy.

There’s the wholesome…

The slightly less so …

And the downright skanky.

Helpfully, a number of the bars provide clues as to what is on offer inside.

All in all, a fun night out the whole family can enjoy.

Last night I flew to Bangkok from Singapore. At the boarding gate I had a few moments to spare, so decided to practice some Thai phrases, in hope of committing them to memory.

There was one spare seat between two young Thai ladies; on it lay a duty free bag. With an eyebrow raise known the world over I questioned whether the seat was available. The more attractive (but only slightly) of the two ladies smiled and placed the bag at her feet. As I sat down I caught the eye of the other Thai girl and smiled. Insurance, you see.

With a practiced neck stretch I turned to my right, more to reassure myself of the girl’s superior beauty than for any rehabilitative purposes. A fraction of a glance rang a tiny note of alarm. Though undeniably attractive, there was a toughness that gave me pause. I stole a second glance, searching for any throat irregularity, but her long hair served as a highly effective mask.

Undeterred I pulled out my iPhone, started up Lingopal and played ‘Hello’ in Thai. Straightaway the girl to my left turned and looked quizzically at my phone. Let the Games begin.

Fortuitously I ended up sitting directly behind this young lady in the plane. Equally fortuitously the couple beside her were boisterous twits, and I happened to have a spare seat beside me.

A student of English in Singapore, Ray was returning to Thailand for the weekend to see her sister. She told me a little about her English course, and showed me a book she was reading, an abridged version of Robin Hood. She was confused about some words though:

‘A Sheriff, Ray, is a policeman.’
‘Poh-leece. Ah.’
‘Nottinghamshire is a place. Like a big village.’
‘Village, ok.’
‘A Forester is… ‘ – I was flummoxed for a moment – ‘… an old-fashioned word for a man who lives in the jungle.’ I don’t think she got a word of that.

I told her that I was planning on travelling around Thailand, testing the phone she had seen earlier, and chose this moment to rehearse all the phrases I had placed in the Favorites section.  The combination of the Flirting lines with the disclosure that my itinerary included Pattaya, led her to advise what to search for and avoid in potential Thai girlfriends.

Pattaya girls, she said, only want your money. When she went there on holiday a little while ago, all the European men kept asking her ‘How much? How much?’
‘The beasts,’ I sympathised.

Ray on the plane from Singapore to Bangkok

A little while later she sheepishly pulled a sheet of paper from her handbag and showed it to me. It was a report card of her studies, with marks ranging from 43% to 55%. It looked depressingly familiar.

I challenged her to write something of our conversation. This is what she wrote:

The plane was descending at the time, hence the shaky hand. Perceptive readers will note however, that the final sentence reads as a reward for my efforts earlier.

Lingopal has now been on sale for 2 weeks, so it’s a good time to have a look at how we’ve been going.

Apple gives us the ability to see the downloads on a daily basis. It’s pretty detailed, splitting the information into geographical iTunes stores and their respective currencies. So far we’ve had sales from about 25 different stores, including Brazil, China and Finland. That’s heartening, because the localisation feature Apple offers doesn’t cover any of those languages (in fact it only covers 6 languages).

Lance tweeted a few days ago that Japan accounted for around 30% of our sales. Pretty interesting considering we haven’t conducted any campaigns specifically targeting the Japanese market. It seems to be working by word of mouth.

Yesterday I delved a little deeper into the tools Apple offers and found the link which organises the most downloaded apps. I checked a few of the stores, seeing how it worked, then checked the paid Travel category in the Japanese store. We were 5th best-selling!

As you can imagine we’re pretty pleased, and would like to think it’s a commendation for the good work we (including Mogeneration and Pollenizer) have done. Having said that, it’s very early days, and while it’s great to have Japan up there, Lingopal is a global app and we want it selling globally.

I guess it’s a resources thing.

Apple has something like 88 iTunes stores right now, some for countries which are well off the beaten track. But they only offer localisation for six non-speaking languages: German, French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish and Japanese.

We’ve done translations for all of these, but with varied results. Here’s the Japanese translation in the administration section:

And here it is in the Japanese iTunes store:

Kind of makes us look a bit silly, given that we’re purporting to be a translation company. Dutch is the same. The others, thankfully, are OK.

The reply email from Apple wasn’t heartening. I paraphrase: ‘We get a lot of emails, so we may get to yours in time…’

Funnily enough we’re getting a few sales from Japan trickling in. I wonder what difference it would make to have the proper translation up there though?

Hallelujah!

Lingopal has been approved for sale in the iTunes stores. It took three attempts, but we’re in now which is the main thing.

It didn’t go that smoothly. When we searched for the app we couldn’t actually see it, either by Release Date or Alphabetically. Then when it did eventually show it was way back in late March, which meant that it never got to feature in the Latest Release list. That must be worth a few sales.

So now’s the time to give it a serious push. You might see our website has changed; it now has a much greater focus on the iPhone. We’ve also been busy making videos. The English language version is up on the home page, and we’ve got Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, Dutch, Japanese and French versions coming.

Here’s the Portuguese one done by the lovely Giselle, who comes from Brazil.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjURuecMml8[/youtube]

I ought to pay tribute (that sounds Hollywood!) to Lance who did the video in Simfinger, a much more elegant solution than my shaky hand. Thanks Lance.

I have been trying to make a video of our iPhone app, and it has been very painful. You would think it ought to be easy – just set it up and go through the motions. Multiple attempts though, have been confounded on uploading to YouTube, which seems to degrade the quality so much that the text in the app is barely legible. The video below started out being 30mb and very clear.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO3Q7HvnVcM[/youtube]

So we’re going to have a crack with an emulator of sorts, which we hope will be much better.

Last night I went to see a show at The Loft Bar in Fremantle. The Fremantle Street Arts Festival was in full swing over the Easter weekend, and in the evening they had a grouped performance, which saved having to go and see the individual acts during the day. Some of the acts were very good (The Blackstreet Boyz, Nick Nickolas), but the one which sticks most in my mind is Trixie Tassels, from the Sugar Blue Burlesque troupe here in Perth. Her dance, to a thumping version of the Peter Gunn Theme, featured a set of twirling tassels which were attached to her breasts. The tassels were aflame. It was glorious.

This is all background, but it helps to set the scene, and partly explains the enlivened state I found myself in after the show. The other part can be explained by alcohol.

I was at the bar talking with friends, and noticed, quite close by, a very attractive Japanese girl. I convinced myself that she was looking over at me.

Perfect, I thought. I reached into my pocket and took from it my iPhone, started Lingopal and set it to Japanese. A couple of clicks later I had the phrase I wanted, and I walked up to her. I had expanded the phrase to fill the screen and simply showed it to her. She burst out laughing, said something in Japanese and tried to take my iPhone. Sensibly I didn’t let it go, but instead allowed her slender fingers to entwine around mine. She was still saying something, giggling. It was highly alluring.

Some people call it a sixth sense. A presence, a feeling – what you will; I felt it. I turned slightly and found myself looking at a rather agitated gentleman, who made it very clear he was the young lady’s boyfriend. A shrug of the shoulders seemed sufficient by way of apology, but it did get me thinking that perhaps we ought to have a category with such lines as “Sorry old chap. Take it as a compliment.”

I’m beginning to be reminded of my teenage years asking girls to dance.

Then the only effects were wounded pride and a hot flush to the cheeks, but these rejections from Apple come with a cost – not only in resubmission but also in loss of potential income. For a small start-up watching every dollar (believe me, we are), that hurts. Each day spent preparing (and paying for) a new build and then later, waiting in the review process is another day of zero sales.

What did we do wrong this time?

Lingopal – Multilingual Phrase Book violates section 3.3.5 of the iPhone SDK Agreement; “Applications must comply with the Human Interface Guidelines and other Documentation provided by Apple.”

The application translates “male” into “马累“ instead of “男性”， which is confusing to users, especially Mandarin speaking users.

Ok, fair cop. There was a bad translation. You could even call it a typo. What else?

“Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.”

That old chestnut.

It would be appropriate to change the title “调情 － 前戏” in the attached screenshots for both Cantonese and Mandarin.

They don’t say which word is offensive, nor offer any suggestions. I asked Yuyan from our office for an explanation. Yuyan is from China, and speaks both Mandarin and Cantonese. Here she is:

In English it says ‘Flirting – 1st Move’. The ‘Flirting’ part shows in all the other categories, so I reasoned that it was the ’1st Move’ part which upset the reviewer. Yuyan said that individually, the words weren’t offensive, but the combination suggested: ‘I want to meet you, but my intentions may not be entirely honourable.’ You have to admire the Chinese for being able to get all that into 4 symbols.

So we made the changes, and will now resubmit for the 3rd time. I’ve alerted Apple about the changes in an email, in hope that we don’t have to go through the process a 4th time. Maybe they’ll reply, but I’m not counting on it.

It’s tedious and painful. For the sake of two words, neither of which were swear words, couldn’t the Apple reviewers had taken a more practical approach along the lines of ‘Ok, it’s approved, but we want to bring your attention to these errors we noted. You should get them corrected for your first update.’

What do you think?

It was with some excitement that I noticed an email from Apple in my Inbox. That sensation quickly dissapated to be replaced by one of frustration and bewilderment, as I learnt that the application had been rejected, and would have to be amended and resubmitted.

Why?

“Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.”

Reasonable judgement. Here’s an example the reviewer gave me.

Hm.

So I had a look around the iTunes store to see what has been approved. Here are some apps I found:

A girl who does whatever you command.

Wobbly boobs.

Flatulence for All!

It goes on …

And then today I learnt that this got through – the old ‘c’ bomb no less.

So I’m left scratching my head. I’d like to know exactly how this review process works; is it one person’s whim, or does it go to a committee? One might argue that farting and wobbly boobs are natural (the jury’s out on the first one – I’m yet to meet a girl who will do whatever you command), but then isn’t trying for a kiss with someone too?

It’s all a bit odd. And inconsistent.

Anyway, to appease Apple we’ve fleeced a few of the phrases in hope that it will be approved a second time round. Let’s wait and see…

We’ve been busy here at Lingopal getting the iPhone version ready, and I’m happy to offer an overview here. I should add that we’ve been working closely with MoGeneration, based in Sydney, a great team of guys with skills and ideas aplenty.

The iPhone really is something else. Having worked with wap and Java for standard handsets, and knowing the toil involved in making the user experience as simple and elegant as possible, the iPhone is breathtakingly refreshing.

Here are some screenshots of what we’ve done so far:

Select your language - 42 to choose from

We’ve tried to make it as intuitive as possible, giving people the earliest opportunity to select their native language. Select it, and all the commands change to match.

Category titles - in German

From there you roll on to Categories (shown above) but we’ve also got options for Search and Favourites too. Here’s a shot of some phrase selections:

Handy for those gorgeous Brazilian girls

Sometimes it’s a little too loud to play the sound-file, or maybe the person you want to communicate with is not close-by. Here’s a natty little solution:

Hopefully you feel a little bit of the excitement that we’ve been feeling. A lot of our competition focus on one language to one language (say English to French, or English to Spanish). Lingopal covers 42 languages* in any combination. That’s over 1600 language combinations.

So the app is now in the Review process with Apple; here’s hoping it’ll come out soon.

*We’ve got Hebrew and Arabic waiting in the wings to join the other 42 languages. Unfortunately the iPhone doesn’t yet support right-to-left languages (that’s how Hebrew and Arabic are written), but we understand it’s a problem Apple are working on.