Outlier Linguistic Solutions

[OneEye]

Yes, we all took some time off after the Kickstarter. Might have been the most stressful month of my life.

 

We're still waiting for the Kickstarter money to reach our account, but once it does we'll be looking to hire a few people and get things going. I'm in the States for the next few weeks visiting family. For now, I'm working on the website, getting a store set up, and figuring out printing and shipping considerations for the posters. Ash will be in Beijing for a conference next month and will be heading to Shanghai for a few days as well. He'll be meeting with quite a few people while there, of course.

 

I'll update here when there's anything significant to say, and of course I'm always happy to answer questions.

[RyanGarg]

Great initiative. Will check when it hits the market.

[Sobria-Ebritas]

 

For each character, you have several hundred words of explanation.

 

Sometimes it takes less time to understand an explanation of 1000 words than an explanation of 100.

 

 

This explanation involves several different kinds of components, but a component that serves one function in this character might serve another function in another character, and yet another function in another character. And there's no system for knowing this, you just have to read each entry and learn it. Reading the entry for one character won't help you with any other characters. Maybe I'm expecting a bit too much out of the words 'system' and 'systematic'.

 

Polonius:

[Aside] Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.

Hamlet Act 2, scene 2, 193–206

[xiaokaka]

Any updates? Are you on schedule? When will the beta testing start?

[OneEye]

We'll be making an announcement soon.

[stapler]

Is it soon yet?

[Shelley]

Are we there yet? Are we there yet?

[ChTTay]

Is there a release date for the dictionary? I backed the kickstarter.

 

Maybe I missed the email or something.

 

Was hoping to use it to study HSK5 ...

[OneEye]

We'll be making an announcement soon.

 

[hoshinoumi]

I took a look at your website and scrolled through the demo version and I have to say that it looks professional, well/designed and extremely useful! However, I find it a bit difficult to see the difference between the normal and expert versions. Is there a way you could show us an example with one character of what you get with the normal version and the expert one??

 

Thanks!

[OneEye]

Yes, it's not especially clear. However, if you open any of the "Full Features" entries, you can see the difference between the Essentials and Expert Edition by clicking "For Experts Only." That will collapse the section that only appears in the Expert Edition. That function doesn't work in the other entries (it's just a demo), but anything appearing below "For Experts Only" won't appear in the Essentials Edition.

[xiaokaka]

In case anyone missed it there was an update today on the Kickstarter page:

“Delay Announcement

Hi,

As you may have guessed, the dictionary release will be delayed. There's a very good reason for that, but I'm going to have to ask everyone to bear with us for a few more days before we give any more details—we're waiting for one last thing to fall in place before we tell you what's going on.

We know our silence has been deafening lately, and how frustrating that must be for all of our backers. Please know that there’s a good reason for our silence.

Our next update (as soon as we can, I promise!) will have more details about the reasons for the delay, as well as an updated release schedule.

-Ash and John”

[stapler]

An announcement about an announcement!

[OneEye]

We've made the full announcement now, including our plan for moving forward. Here it is on Kickstarter and our blog.

[mouse]

What a crappy thing to happen. I don't think anyone will mind waiting a little longer given the circumstances.

[Luxi]

I'm sorry about your problems, OneEye, it sounds like an awful nightmare. Your plan sounds good to me, I hope you can stick to it, I'm sure a staggered release will keep most people happy.

 

It'd really be nice if you kept us informed via your blog and/or posts here.

 

Good luck!

[Demonic_Duck]

Damn. Hope you guys get back what you're owed in court! I have a question, though...

Release a “mini-version” that will give enough information to get you started using functional components right away

Does "right away" mean release it right away, or that it will allow you to start right away once released? If it means the latter, what's the timeframe for this?

[Angelina]

it means to get you started using functional components, in other words to make it available for users to start learning functional components

[mikelove]

@Demonic_Duck - the announcement says 3 months.

 

Few notes on this on my end:

• We've known about the situation for a few months now, and the lack of public updates was done with my blessing + encouragement; between the legal dispute and the new investor it seemed to me like an update to the effect of "progress is stalled, Chris took our money, but we're hoping that some combination of a court ruling and/or new investor will let us get moving again" would do a lot more harm than good and likely make it that much more difficult for them to actually get things moving again.
• New investor is not Pleco or myself; we don't currently have any ownership stake in Outlier.
• Software-wise, the plan is that this 'mini-version' will be basically just a regular add-on dictionary for the current version of Pleco, so no need to fumble around with beta versions (or be stuck using a buggy beta version of Pleco just to get access to the dictionary you purchased); you'll see a mini Outlier entry among your other items in the DICT tab with a list of / hyperlinks to the entries for each functional component.
• More comprehensive Outlier integration - letting you use their breakdowns in place of ours in CHARS, support for new formatting features from their demo like tables / sound series, etc - will follow in our next major update, Pleco 4.0, which we're hoping to have out this fall. Still up in the air whether we'll also offer the full version of their dictionary for the current Pleco 3.x, mostly because we haven't yet settled on the system requirements for 4.0; if it leaves a significant number of old devices behind (unlikely on Android but possible on iOS) we'd want to make sure users of those old devices could access the dictionary too. (on the Android side it'll probably still just be Android 4.0 or maybe 4.1 - only 42% of our Android users are on Android 5 or later - but 95% of our iOS users are on iOS 9 and based on past history we expect that by November 80% of them will be on iOS 10, so if Apple gives us a compelling reason to go 10-only we might have to consider it)
  
  If Outlier's full dictionary is ready before Pleco 4.0 is we've got plans in place to release a "Pleco 3.5" to fully support it - don't want to add any additional delay on our end, obviously - but we're actually feeling pretty good about getting it done in time. (we'd originally been planning to do that 3.5 release anyway before we learned that the dictionary was delayed, but we're now pressing right ahead with 4.0 since 3.5 wasn't really going to offer enough outside of Outlier's dictionary to justify the attendant public beta testing / announcements / etc)

[xiaokaka]

Thanks for the updates OneEye and Mike! That clears up a lot! 

 

One thing that wasn't mentioned (I think, sorry if I missed it) was what will will happen with book/learners manual that you planned to do with Olle Linge and John Pasden. Is that postponed indefinitely or is there a time plan for that as well? I understand (and agree) if you plan to fully focus on the dictionary itself for the time being.