Pleco Software is a cool little New York company focused on exactly one thing: creating the world's best tools for learning Chinese.
Our flagship product, Pleco® 2.0 for iPhone / iPod Touch / iPad, Windows Mobile, and Palm OS, gives you everything you need to look up and study Chinese vocabulary: content from eight different dictionaries, handwriting input, flexible Pinyin searches, audio, stroke order diagrams, a built-in document reader, and one of the most advanced and customizable flashcard systems ever invented. And all of this running on a device you can carry around in your pocket.
We're profitable, privately-held, and have been in business since 2000, and we back up our products with excellent customer service, an active user community, and generous upgrade policies.
We've just announced an incredibly cool new feature for the next version of Pleco, 2.2; an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) that lets you point your iPhone's camera at Chinese characters to look them up "live" (similar to an "augmented reality" system): demo video is here (or here if you can't access YouTube).
Also, we're finally working on an Android version of Pleco, and have just signed a license for our first Classical Chinese dictionary; details on all of these in our latest announcement email.
With the release of the latest update to iPhone OS (now known as iOS), it's now possible to install add-on files for our iPhone / iPod / iPad software directly via USB instead of having to download them over WiFi / 3G. This works on iPads running OS 3.2 as well as on iPhones / iPods that have been upgraded to OS 4.
Paid add-ons still have to be purchased through an internet connection on your device, due to Apple restrictions, but if your internet access is limited, or you're on a pay-per-KB type data plan, you can do the actual file downloads on your computer instead of on your handheld and only need a few minutes' worth of internet connectivity to make your purchase. Free add-ons like CC-CEDICT can be installed entirely via this method, no internet connection needed at all.
For download links and instructions, see this page.
We've just lowered the prices of our software on Windows Mobile and Palm OS to match the prices we offer on iPhone; this includes upgrades, so if there's a new dictionary you'd been meaning to buy, you might find it's gotten a lot cheaper now. If you've purchased a Palm/WM bundle or upgrade from us anytime in 2010, send us an email if you'd like to request a refund of the price difference.
We've also, regrettably, removed the Oxford Concise English & Chinese Dictionary from all of our Palm OS and Windows Mobile software bundles, and stopped selling it as an upgrade. While we're still hopeful that we'll soon be able to offer that dictionary on iPhone, it simply no longer made financial sense for us to continue selling it on Palm and Windows Mobile. This will not, however, prevent customers who already purchased Oxford on Palm/WM from continuing to use it; you'll still be able to download its database files on our website, you'll still be able to move it over to a new Palm/WM device, and in the unlikely event that we update our Palm/WM software in such a way as to make the old Oxford database incompatible with it we'd plan to release an updated version of that database. You just won't be able to buy a new copy of Oxford for Pleco on Palm/WM anymore.
We've just released another update to our iPhone software, version 2.1.1, adding support for multitasking in the new iPhone OS (now "iOS") version 4 which Apple's scheduled to release on Monday. It also adds high-resolution display support for the new iPhone 4, USB file transfer support for both iOS 4 and the iPad, a Bluetooth inter-device "share files" feature, a new feature which breaks down long search queries for which no exact match is found into their component parts, and a new option to display common second-character suggestions in the handwriting recognizer after tapping on a character match. Plus better web browser file download support, a bold-faced font option in stroke order diagrams, and lots of other minor bug fixes / tweaks. For a complete list of changes, see the version history section of the online instruction manual. You can download the update through the "Updates" tab in App Store.
Another minor update (2.1.2) will likely be released in a few weeks, once we've gotten some feedback from iOS 4 users (keep those emails coming) on multitasking / high-resolution display support and how we can improve it, but the big item on the horizon is version 2.2, hopefully out sometime around the end of the summer; this will include a major streamlining / overhaul of the user interface (especially on iPad), but we're also hoping to have one or two new dictionary licenses to announce by then, and we're in negotiations to add one other top-secret new feature that we're very very excited about.
