The product of about three weeks of on and off work is finally complete and uploaded on the App Store for everyone to download for free. Given the choice, what do I end up making for the final project of my iPhone class? A Chinese dictionary, of course! It's called Qǐngwèn (请问/請問) and has the following icon:
I know it screams "Japanese!" and well, for people who don't like that, I can't help it. It's the first thing I came up with in Photoshop after spending a couple of minutes fiddling around with colors and I couldn't make anything else that looked better. The unfortunate part about making apps is that the icon is the last thing you do and the thing you spend the least effort on, but the most important aspect in the initial attraction prospective users feel towards your app and a bad icon can dramatically reduce the number of people who try out your app. And since most of us small developers can't afford professional designers, we're left with whatever we can come up with in Photoshop in a few minutes before submitting the app to the App Store.
Anyway, a decent icon will make the user tap your application's name in the search results, but then you have to keep the experience going with some screenshots, which are the next thing a user bases their decision of whether or not to download your app on. So, here's one of those:
Of course, there are additional screenshots and also much better presented on the website I've made specifically for Qǐngwèn, which is karanmisra.com/qingwen. Which brings me to the other thing you do in a hurry once you're done making the app: the website. In my case, I needed something that looked decent but definitely did not have the time to sit and do hand coded CSS (not that I'm good at that sort of stuff anyway), so I ended up making it in iWeb which is absolutely superb in the way that it lets you take your ideas and directly convert them to a website as long as you don't care about the fact that all the CSS is inlined. So, don't go look at the source of that website.
Of course, as far as the app itself is concerned, there are two main features: search and word lists. And all I did was to try to make those two features as smooth and simple to use as possible, trying to eke out as much performance as I could out of the iPhone's little CPU. Apart from that, two major components in the app are actually not done by me. The dictionary comes from the free (and slowly growing towards excellence) CC-CEDICT and the handwriting-based input method, which by the way is abso-fucking-lutely incredible, comes from Apple itself, and I need to write an accolade to it at some point (for instance, look at this screenshot in which I wrote that character by hand and its first guess was exactly what I was going for.)
And that's Qǐngwèn, the Chinese dictionary for the iPhone and iPod touch, that I made mostly over winter break. Of course, I've already started work on version 2.0 and there's loads of stuff I have to both fix and improve upon.
I know it screams "Japanese!" and well, for people who don't like that, I can't help it. It's the first thing I came up with in Photoshop after spending a couple of minutes fiddling around with colors and I couldn't make anything else that looked better. The unfortunate part about making apps is that the icon is the last thing you do and the thing you spend the least effort on, but the most important aspect in the initial attraction prospective users feel towards your app and a bad icon can dramatically reduce the number of people who try out your app. And since most of us small developers can't afford professional designers, we're left with whatever we can come up with in Photoshop in a few minutes before submitting the app to the App Store.
Anyway, a decent icon will make the user tap your application's name in the search results, but then you have to keep the experience going with some screenshots, which are the next thing a user bases their decision of whether or not to download your app on. So, here's one of those:
Of course, there are additional screenshots and also much better presented on the website I've made specifically for Qǐngwèn, which is karanmisra.com/qingwen. Which brings me to the other thing you do in a hurry once you're done making the app: the website. In my case, I needed something that looked decent but definitely did not have the time to sit and do hand coded CSS (not that I'm good at that sort of stuff anyway), so I ended up making it in iWeb which is absolutely superb in the way that it lets you take your ideas and directly convert them to a website as long as you don't care about the fact that all the CSS is inlined. So, don't go look at the source of that website.
Of course, as far as the app itself is concerned, there are two main features: search and word lists. And all I did was to try to make those two features as smooth and simple to use as possible, trying to eke out as much performance as I could out of the iPhone's little CPU. Apart from that, two major components in the app are actually not done by me. The dictionary comes from the free (and slowly growing towards excellence) CC-CEDICT and the handwriting-based input method, which by the way is abso-fucking-lutely incredible, comes from Apple itself, and I need to write an accolade to it at some point (for instance, look at this screenshot in which I wrote that character by hand and its first guess was exactly what I was going for.)
And that's Qǐngwèn, the Chinese dictionary for the iPhone and iPod touch, that I made mostly over winter break. Of course, I've already started work on version 2.0 and there's loads of stuff I have to both fix and improve upon.
Labels: English
20 comments
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Congrats on your first iPhone app! I really like the brown shades you went with for the app.
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Thanks! I really thought the brown shading would be appropriate for a dictionary, since it reminded me somewhat of books.
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Congratulations on releasing the app -- this looks like it'll be a really nice addition to the iPhone.
Feature/pony request time: One killer feature would be if it supported custom dictionaries. WeDict Pro supports StarDict-format dictionaries (which brings all kinds of Chinese-Chinese dictionary goodness -- I use Chinese-Chinese dictionaries a lot more than Chinese-English dictionaries), but the implementation is lousy and the app frequently refuses to download dictionaries. Any chance of seeing this happen in 2.0? -
Nice work. You've raised the bar for the rest of us.
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Beautifully designed app. I can't decide whether the aesthetics or function is better.
Request: export word lists -
The link to the screenshot you've linked is broken.
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Hi, it's perfect app! Just a small bugreport: even after switching the traditional character set, the logic remains simplified (as well as button captions): i.e. the screen for character 颱 offers a search for words containing 台 or a search for 只 returns also results like 隻 etc.
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@Everyone: Thank you!
@Abhishek: Fixed the broken link.
@Hans: I'm aware of that bug. It should be fixed in the next release. -
I can't find a way to draw a character. Do i have to install something else?
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I also can't find a way to access the handwriting input screen. All I can get is a keyboard. Advice?
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You need to activate the Pinyin and/or Handwriting keyboards from Settings > International > Keyboards using the iPhone's Settings app.
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That worked, thanks! I think a lot of us iPhone noobs aren't aware that this functionality has to be enabled through the phone's general settings.
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you should contact the developer of ktdict and perhaps hybridize your two apps. His/her app has instant lookup, whereas yours has wordlists and traditional/simplified, which is really cool... some kind of combo of the two apps would be the best chinese dictionary out there and you could sell it for $5 or something
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Very nice dictionary, good ergonomy (the best free Chinese dictionary at the moment in my opinion).
Ideas for improvements in next versions :
- quality and number of entries (some usefull words are not in the dictionary, but maybe this "lightness" is the reason your dictionary is faster than Dianhua)
- management of wordlists (last word in at the top of the list instead of the bottom, import and export options, options to hide translation and/or pinyin in "study mode")
Thanks again ! -
Also a bug report : sometimes (I can't really say when it happens) some wordlist entries get lost, more precisely if my list looks like this:
word1
word2
word3
word4
It might become like this:
word1
word1
word1
word4
so one word entry replaces other entries -
when I make multiple word lists, the program abruptly quits when I scroll down to add new words to the newer lists. Very annoying for a program that is otherwise excellent.
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Hi, please contact me by email, thanks!
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Hi. I loved the app; used it during my vacation in China to write new words down. Then I restored my iPhone from Scratch, forgetting I had QingWen :( , hence losing all my precious vocabulary list. What a shame. My suggestion would then be to have an "online backup" system (by email adress); or at least an Export feature; as someone suggested. But definetely, the online backup (such as the one implemented in the app "Weightbot" by Tapbots) seems the best.
Regards, -
Hi, the bug I mentioned above (word entries get overwritten by a single one repeating itself) happens when I use the delete function for some words in my list.
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Thanks for reporting the bug! I will definitely look into it very soon.
