posted by memnoch87 on July 19, 2012 | 8 comments
HiI was wondering if there was any movement on an android app for popup chinese. I would love to be able to access my popup Chinese stuff in one place as oppose to using third party apps to do everything.Memnoch
For example all the third party podcast apps make a real mess of my podcasts. I can't easily do tests and there is no really decent hand writing app for android.I think if someone made an app that allowed you to study all the popup chinese stuff (or just selected stuff) on the go it would be a massive success. Just look at how well Skritter is doing on the IOS. Popup Chinese is definitely the best service I use but because I spend so much of my time traveling I dont get the best use out of it.Memnoch
This is really a tough question for us. Adding iOS and Android apps might improve our visibility among Chinese students, but would also mean putting a lot of effort into developing separate interfaces for devices using entirely different development toolkits. This would come at the expense of rolling out more general features or branching into other languages like Spanish which might also broaden our visibility.
Since it is possible to listen to our MP3 files on both Android and iOS phones using existing software, we haven't committed to developing standalone applications for that. Instead, to the extent we have a mobile strategy, it is to develop mobile tools that serve more limited functions and then improve them and integrate them with the site based on feedback and our own feelings. This is what is happening with our iOS Writing Pad now, which is getting a facelift and the introduction of higher-resolution vector graphics. We may add extra review tools to the same app so that it becomes a more general review tool. What this means practically is that our Study Center is more likely to "go mobile" than our lesson archive.
As far as Android -- it's easier for me personally to prototype stuff on iOS since I'm familiar with the development environment. A decent number of people have written-in asking for Android support, so it is something that we know has to come eventually. That said, I'm also not sure it makes sense to explicitly port anything to Android until we have something we're happy with that works with iOS.
Although I would love to see Android related applications for 泡泡中文 because I only use Android stuff, I have no issue loading the website on my phone if needed. I often load up the review portion on the bus and crank through vocab while I ride home. No additional application needed. Given this, so long as the feature works on the site it seems to work on my phone so please focus on the site! Just my two cents.
Noah.Pflugradt on July 21, 2012 | reply
I strongly vote for first putting in some decent lesson study tools on the website and try them out there. Right it's still dead boring to listen to lessons on the website, because besides reviewing the words there simply isn't anything to do. And sitting there and staring at the screen for hours just isn't very motivating.
For podcasts, transcripts and (sort of) flash cards, I wrote "321 Chinese" for Windows Phone, specifically for Popup Chinese (even though I also use it with another Mandarin podcast provider). As for Android, just like David said, there is no real incentive for me to learn, set up and maintain an entirely different development environment to write a free app. Windows 8 is another story, and I plan to port it to that platform.
Hi there, A slightly different issue I have come across and was wondering if anyone can suggest a workaround. For the most part, I'm quite happily using the MP3's and PDF's on my android phone (Samsung Galaxy) but I have noticed that although the PDF's work on my Macbook fine, some of the text doesn't appear when I view the PDF on my mobile phone. Normally, its the English and Pinyin translations of vocabulary that appear after the main dialog. I suspect it may have something to do with how the text is laid out (it looks like it is possibly imported from Excel when prepared.) On my phone, I can only see the Chinese. I have tried it with three separate PDF readers, all with the same results. Whilst not essential, the vocab is quite useful when I'm studying on my commute! Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.William.