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!

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.

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: