Sougou pinyin input for Mac？

[hanxue]

I tried Sougou pinyin input at my friend's PC the other day and it seems pretty neat, but I'm a Mac user so I'm afraid there's no Mac version of it.

Is there?

[muirm]

As far as I know Sogou is not available on the Mac. The best pinyin input I have found for Mac is QIM. It isn't free, but it works really well.

If you get it be sure to also install their "Intelligent Sentence Generation" database, which greatly improves the sentence/word guessing.

[hanxue]

Thanks, I just tried it and it seems pretty neat, though it doesn't seem all that much better than the default Mac pinyin input, or am I missing something? (I did install QIT, too.)

Also, the "Candidate Palette" seems a bit crammed together (not enough space in between entries and in between the number and the entry), which makes it somewhat inconvenient to quickly spot the phrase you're looking for.... Anything that could be done about that?

I've attached some screenshots, the difference is quite apparent.

[muirm]

You can adjust some setting with the candidate palette like number of candidates per row, font size, and some other stuff, but I'm not sure those would help with crammedness.

By not much better than default Mac IME, do you mean the candidates are not as good, or the interface isn't improved? Did you enable QIT in the preferences? I can't remember if it does it for you or not.

There are tons of preferences for QIM, with lots of options for custom input codes and dictionaries, and a bunch of other stuff I don't really understand. If you like that sort of customizability, you can play around with that stuff too.

[hanxue]

Yeah, I've already played around with font/font size and number of candidates. It's neat that you can choose any font you want!

By not much better than the default Mac pinyin input I meant the candidates, yeah, for example when I typed mingchao (明朝) it actually didn't show up in QIM, yet it did in the default Mac pinyin... It's kind of odd that something as common as Ming dynasty wouldn't show up?!

Btw, I've e-mailed the developer and he said he's releasing v. 1.9 next month and it will apparently have a different candidate palette that will supposedly not be as crammed as it currently is...

Edited April 12, 2010 at 02:11 PM by jon09

[liuxht]

You can try Sougou online Cloud pinyin input.

Having a look at this: http://pinyin.sogou.com/cloud/

firefox plugin: http://pinyin.sogou.com/cloud/ff.html

Java script:

javascript:void((function(){var%20e=document.createElement('script');e.setAttribute('src','http://web.pinyin.sogou.com/web_ime/init.js');document.body.appendChild(e);})())

[hanxue]

I already tried the Firefox plugin before, but it's not really useful for me since I rarely use FF... What I need is a pinyin input that I can use anywhere I want - whether it be in my browser, Word, MSN, anything.

[liuxht]

Hmm, the only mac pinyin input method i know is Fun Input Toy(FIT), it's not as good as Sougou pinyin.

[hanxue]

Now that I've used QIM for a couple of days and have used up my 10000 hanzi trial, I can say it is indeed quite a bit more convenient than the default Mac pinyin input system!

Still not on a par with Sougou, but probably the closest it will get to it on Mac.

[imron]

Now that I've used QIM for a couple of days and have used up my 10000 hanzi tria

10,000 hanzi in a couple of days? What were you typing?

[hanxue]

Well, I used the pinyin input for all things related to Chinese - chatting, looking up vocabs etc etc. It's not that hard to reach 10,000.. ;)

[hanxue]

So I liked the input so much that I bought a license! I asked the developer what the new version will bring, and this is what he replied: "The main updates in 1.9 is bundle with Sogou ( A famous Chinese Pinyin input methods on Windows ) supports. IMKQIM will support Sogou cell dictionary, skins and online dictionary update."

Sounds good

[creamyhorror]

Well, I used the pinyin input for all things related to Chinese - chatting, looking up vocabs etc etc. It's not that hard to reach 10,000.. ;)

Wow, I don't think I type 6,000 words in two weeks in English (rough conversion), my first language. But I don't really chat/IM.

[engrafted]

I'll buy it as soon as that update is out. It sounds like it'll be almost as good as Sougou!

That makes me very happy.

[tooironic]

As mentioned in the other post, Sogou has now released a version for Mac. Yay!

[tooironic]

OK I've got it installed, and I can change the skins, but it looks like I can't change the font size like I can in the Windows version. Does anyone know if this can be done? I'm looking on their website for "big"-fontsize skins, but so far not much luck.

Well I found this one and the font size is large enough I guess. You might think I'm strange for being so obsessed with this, but squinting at Chinese characters all day gives my eyes the worst strain.

[imron]

I don't think you can. It's rather lacking in configuration options. QIM however does allow you to change the font size.

[hanxue]

Yeah, QIM does allow it and is quite more configurable than Sogou... The latter is currently only good for typing in simplified characters, and the sad thing is the developers don't seem to give a damn about the user feedback.

[tooironic]

Oh I only just realised that Mac's default Chinese input can allow you to increase the character size and orientation - not bad! I think I'll just use that one now, Sogou doesn't really seem worth it now...