Pleco equivalent for desktop PC

[veneficus]

I saw my friend using Pleco and I want it. Only problem is I don't have an android.

Is there equivalent software or online support for a desktop machine? I looove the ability to add a character to a flashcard in one click and export a list to mnemosyne in another click.

[Shelley]

Pleco is available for Windows mobile and Iphone/itouch too. I have been using the windows mobile version for a year or so now and its good.

The only thing I have found that comes close to Pleco for Desktop is the Declans range of chinese procucts. But it is not in any way a replacement for pleco.

Some people like Anki but i don't. That dosen't mean its not good for you, so try it.

But i have to say Pleco is so good it is almost worth getting an android mobile device just to have it

[roddy]

It's actually worth buying a smart phone to have it - what will a low-end second hand phone cost you? What's it worth to have Pleco in your pocket? Even a beat up old iPod Touch will do the job.

[Shelley]

Agree 100% with roddy

[icebear]

Also fully agreed - if budget is a concern, look into used iPod Touches or used Android phones (mid range).

[giraffe]

I believe you can also run an Android emulator on your desktop. Not sure how well Pleco would work though.

[mikelove]

Used midrange Android phones and iPod Touches are indeed quite cheap - you can probably get an LG P500 for less than the cost of a copy of Pleco now.

As far as running Pleco in an emulator on desktops, we haven't actually tested that, but at the moment it would probably be rather laggy because most of Pleco's core is native ARM code, which runs great on mobile processors but has to be emulated (at a major performance cost) on PC ones.

However, Google recently added support for Android devices to use the same X86 processors that PCs have (in fact, they just launched the very first X86 Android smartphone, in India of all places), and we're planning to support those in PlecoDroid sometime within the next year or so. So the emulation potential should get a lot better then.

[外国赤佬]

Wenlin is desktop based.

[character]

Looks like the wait is over: http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/3/8339197/android-apps-on-windows-mac-linux-chrome-os Run Android apps on your PC/Mac.

 

I did a quick test and Pleco seems to work; I was also able to download/install free add-ons.  I installed ARC Welder in Chrome, downloaded the Pleco APK from Pleco's home page https://www.pleco.com/ and was soon running Pleco on my desktop. 

 

[ChTTay]

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32160263

BBC also has this story too

[deathtrap]

I've actually used Pleco for Android in an Android x86 emulator on Windows 8 and it runs great. I haven't noticed any slowdowns in it at all. Everything is fully functional and I haven't noticed any odd behavior.

 

I would probably go with character's suggestion of running it in Chrome just because it's a lot easier to set up.

 

I just realized this is a 3 year old thread.

[character]

 

I just realized this is a 3 year old thread.

 

I think it's good practice to search for existing topics before creating a new, duplicate one.

 

It will be interesting if Pleco the company gives its blessing to running Pleco the software this way. 

 

ETA: Based on this response in Pleco's forum, it looks like official recognition is unlikely: http://plecoforums.com/threads/google-arc-welder.4590/

 

If you try running Pleco on your desktop, please post about how it works.

[laurenth]

If anyone's interested, I've just tried it on Linux (3.19 running Xubuntu) with Chrome version 41.0.2272.101 (64-bit) and the free version of Pleco. It works beautifully. 

 

Now, I would not purchase a second license for Pleco on my desktop, if only because I spend 90% of my Chinese study time on my phone, but as the free Pleco dictionary is one of the best anyway, and it includes EN-ZH searches, hand-writing (mouse-writing in this case) recognition,  plenty of example sentences, etc., it's nice to have it handy on my desktop too.

[mikelove]

Official recognition might still happen, the response to this has been rather impressive and we're currently reaching out to the licensors with no-desktop-version clauses (thankfully not too many) to see how many of them will consider this a problem.

 

It should theoretically be possible for us to detect + block some dictionaries from use in ARC Welder, and while that might be slightly irritating for people who are using those dictionaries happily in ARC Welder now I would tend to think that the benefits from official recognition (bug fixes, official packages, maybe x86-accelerated native libraries, etc) would offset that. And if we can tell the problematic licensors that we've seen an average increase of X % in sales from ARC Welder users (if such an increase materializes) it might persuade them to drop their restrictions too.

[stapler]

mikelove: are you able to  tell us what dictionaries we are allowed to use when running Pleco through the ARC Welder?

[mikelove]

Not clear yet, waiting for responses from publishers. There's nothing in any license that would unambiguously bar a dictionary from being used in ARC Welder, but in some of them it's a bit of a gray area and we'd rather not take any chances. But at the present time there isn't any specific dictionary which I would definitively say can't / shouldn't be used in ARC Welder, and with a little luck there won't ever be :-)

[allenkt]

I'm running it on my Mac (OS X El Capitan) and while it works I can't paste into the program.  So good for looking up characters but not as useful for translating lines....unless I'm doing something wrong. I did have the box checked to allow clipboard access but nothing seems to paste into the search window.  Would be great if I could get it to work though....then I could give up on Wenlin and just use Pleco.

[EricJMa]

I've also been patiently waiting almost six years for the desktop Pleco version to be released. I need this to be a reality!

 

Meanwhile, I have been using the YoudaoDict stand alone app as my "Pleco" on my Macbook. YoudaoDict is the translation engine wechat uses and it seems to be the "go to" app my Chinese friends all use to define and translate English words to Chinese. They provide good definitions for Chinese and English and have great example native Chinese sentences. You may need to practice your reverse translation skills a bit since it does focus on Chinese to English definitions and translation.

 

While I don't recommend this option to absolute beginners, it's should be reasonable to navigate for the intermediate to advance Chinese learner.  While it's not Pleco, I have found it useful and helpful when working on my Macbook.

 

http://cidian.youdao.com/index-mac.html

 

I provided some screen shots of YoudaoDict on OS X El Capitan. I'm sure there is also a windows download as well.

 

 

 

 

[mikelove]

Copy-and-paste seems to be emulator-dependent - might have better luck with a different one, BlueStacks or ARChon or ARC Welder.

 

There's actually now more-or-less official confirmation from Google that they're adding support for running Android apps to Chrome OS, so that desktop platform at least should be able to run Pleco very soon (presumably using a more stable version of ARC Welder with some extra APIs) - more details will come tomorrow at the second day of Google I/O.

 

It seems quite possible that Apple will follow suit next month at WWDC - the Mac App Store is so moribund at this point that I'd almost say they don't have a choice, and a desktop/tablet linkup would also help move a lot more of those giant expensive keyboard-attaching iPads.

 

As far as Windows, though, there just isn't the money to justify a native Windows app. It seems clear that most of our users would be unwilling to buy a brand new copy of Pleco to use on desktops - they'd expect most of their purchases to transfer over for free - but an 'upgrade fee' wouldn't really be enough to cover development costs by itself (particularly as many of our licensors would - not unreasonably - expect a cut). And the failure of Windows Phone to gain any significant traction means there are very few potential customers out there who don't own a Pleco-compatible iOS or Android device, so we wouldn't make enough to cover our costs via new customers as we've done with Android (and before that with iOS).

 

We are still working on a web-based product, though - it's slow going, mostly for licensing reasons, but we're gradually creeping up on it; the web front end for our cantonese.org project gave us a chance to try out a few basic ideas for web-based dictionaries, the pending redesign of our flashcard system is finally getting the change tracking support it needs for efficient web-based sync, and we're playing around with other enhancements we might offer with a web-based offering as well. So the best hope for a version of Pleco you can use on a Windows device without an emulator is probably that.

[allenkt]

Eric, that solution wouldn't work for me because I'm translating classical medical texts so I need Kroll's dictionary and Wiseman's dictionary, both of which I already have in Pleco.

 

I am using ARC Welder in Chrome so I'll give it a while and see if they update it and add some API's soon.  If not, I'll give one of the other ones a try.