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!

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf English verfügbar.

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf English verfügbar.

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf English verfügbar.

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.