Macworld: Ultralingua 7.0.1 ...

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36 Replies Last post: Aug 30, 2008 6:17 AM by robbo42 Go to original post 1 2 3 Previous Next

ronshirley

2 posts since
Mar 3, 2008

15. Jun 19, 2008 6:36 AM

in response to: Rhywun

Re: Ultralingua 7.0.1

I agree with Rhywun, why would Ultralingua choose Portugese, Italian and all these other minor languages for support but not Chinese, the language used by the most people in the world and arguably the most important language behind English?

I suspect that more English speaking people will be trying to learn Chinese as a foreign language than any other language soon. It is probably second only to Spanish now.

I will be very interested in the product when they produce a Mandarin Chinese version.

dmwmw

2 posts since
Jun 14, 2008

16. Jun 19, 2008 6:39 AM

in response to: ultralingua

Re: Ultralingua 7.0.1

Again, a little openness here would greatly aid people making informed decisions about your products. Is the information you just gave about past participle agreement in Italian posted on your website anywhere? What about spinoza2's question about Latin dictionaries? Despite being priced the same, there is a wide variance in the quality of the dictionaries you sell. There is also a pretty wide variance in how much attention each dictionary gets from version to version that, if you were actually forthcoming about what those changes were, would make people realize that they are getting less for their substantial upgrade price than they might think.

I'm not bashing you here just to cause trouble. I use your dictionaries, often. But I recognize when I'm being taken for a ride. Ultralingua has a long history of these exorbitant upgrade costs after making minimal UI improvements and calling it a major version. The latest Mac version is a welcome change, and well done. I have no problem paying for these kinds of improvements, but forcing people to pay an upgrade price for each dictionary independently, without any indication and regardless of how much work actually went into that dictionary from version to version, is unfair and verging on dishonest. That may seem a strong statement, but your standardized upgrade pricing implies that an equal amount of work goes into each dictionary from version to version, which is not true.

robbo42

4 posts since
Jun 19, 2008

17. Jun 19, 2008 12:51 PM

in response to: ultralingua

Re: Ultralingua 7.0.1

I find this response quite extraordinary. It is like selling a calculator that can't get a batch of square roots correct and saying that it is not a problem because the other brand can't either. And that anyway, doing square roots is quite hard. How does this fit with saying that you don't want to release a product that is imperfect?

At least the product description could provide a disclaimer acknowledging the issue. I now wonder how many students have lost marks in assignments because they trusted their Ultralingua Italian dictionary.

ultralingua

6 posts since
Jun 13, 2008

18. Jun 20, 2008 6:28 AM

in response to: robbo42

Re: Ultralingua 7.0.1

@robbo42 (and others)

Golly! It's a tough audience sometimes! Seriously, though, we appreciate being held to a high standard, and we are redoubling our efforts on the conjugator issue in order to finish that one quickly; with luck we can get it into our next micro-release. I'd just like to say that the comparison with a calculator doesn't really, well, "add up" very well: a calculator has known functions and parameters, whereas natural language is inherently messy and "untotalizable." All dictionaries will always be imperfect, because language cannot be fully contained. (There is no such thing as a "complete" dictionary of any language; the OED is but a very good sketch of English.) Mind you, I'm not defending the presence of errors; I'm just explaining why it is impossible to wait until a dictionary is "complete" before publishing it.

On the issue of differences in the new versions of databases, it is true that some do not evolve: little has been added to Latin-English (the language isn't really evolving) or to Norwegian-English (as that is a dataset owned by Kunnskapsforlaget). However, we announced in our newsletter (also published on our user forum) broad description of the data updates. We have not published anywhere an exhaustive list of all enhancements to data (or to the UI), as that would be a very long list to compile and no one has been clamoring for it. Certainly something to consider.

ultralingua

6 posts since
Jun 13, 2008

19. Jun 20, 2008 6:39 AM

in response to: ronshirley

Re: Ultralingua 7.0.1

@ Rhywun and ronshirley

Don't fret! We're working to develop Asian language products, too. But we're a small company, and there is a limit to how much we can do at one time. (Note that just in this thread we have people clamoring for 1) enhanced features, 2) stronger conjugation in Italian, 3) exhaustive summaries of all changes (presumably localized for the languages of our site), 4) entirely new datasets (e.g. Chinese). Which of these should we do? All, of course. But if we focus just on Chinese, others will be unhappy; if we rush to put out Chinese, the database will be skimpy, and people will complain that it's not good enough. We are trying to work with other publishers to bring some other datasets out more quickly, but it's not a simple job. (Oh, and did I mention that we have several other platforms to support, as well as other products?)

Maybe this is not the time to whisper the other secret, that a lot of energy has been going to develop a version for a certain very prominent mobile platform that is soon to accept third party applications...!

Anyway, keep the ideas flowing. Note that it is easier for us to handle if you submit them via our site, at http://www.ultralingua.com/en/email.htm

spinoza2

50 posts since
Jan 24, 2008

20. Jun 20, 2008 6:49 AM

in response to: ultralingua

Re: Ultralingua 7.0.1

Ultralingua,
I'm assuming, since you didn't respond to my question about pricing, that the Macworld article is in error, and that the three-language price is $28 per language and not $25, as Macworld reported.

You mention updating the Latin dictionary, but you say nothing about its comprehensiveness, so can I assume it's as comprehensive as a good Latin desk dictionary that can be used for translating Roman and Neo-Latin texts?

I would also agree with the others that your 'up-front' marketing on Website can stand for improvement--you need to provide more information and your product info needs to be more transparent. Again, it seems like you've got excellent products but the presentation and sale of them are pretty rough-edged!

Finally, I would also encourage you to distinguish between 'maintenance' upgrades and the release of a new product version, as other software companies do. The former can take care of lexical improvements and minor additions, as well as minor interface improvements, and the latter can include a significant increase to the number of words in the dictionaries, and with major UI changes. Doing this would keep your customer base happy campers, which you want for increased word-of-mouth advertising and recommending of your products.

In any case, keep up the good work!

ultralingua

6 posts since
Jun 13, 2008

21. Jun 20, 2008 6:59 AM

in response to: spinoza2

Re: Ultralingua 7.0.1

Whoops; I missed a couple of items.

The pricing for three or more products is 20% off. For the Mac dictionaries that works out to be a little under $28.

Regarding the Latin question, just a couple of points: 1) if you mean, are we as good as the giant Lewis and Short, the answer is no; we're like a small desktop dictionary for Latin-English. 2) We should perhaps consider putting a chart on our FAQ (to augment what we already show at http://www.ultralingua.com/en/FAQs/faq_using_ul.htm#1), in which we can show the number of entries per title. ("Entries," though, is a very dangerous number to play with in the world of dictionaries, as there is no standard way of defining -- and thus counting -- them.

The upgrade issue is thornier. We'll have to think about that, as the data updates are hardly "minor maintenance issues"; sometimes we are offering massively re-edited dictionary data, which we consider to be the core of the tool.

spinoza2

50 posts since
Jan 24, 2008

22. Jun 20, 2008 7:14 AM

in response to: ultralingua

Re: Ultralingua 7.0.1

Great, many thanks for the quick response and for pointing out your FAQ (which is not easy to find on our own, by the way!). By your response and in your FAQ you note:
”Most of our bilingual dictionaries contain approximately 300,000 translation entries (although Italian-English, Portuguese-English, and French-German have somewhat fewer).“
So in the spirit of ”transparent“ background info, I can safely assume that your Latin dictionary would also have 300,000 translation entries, which would make quite it an impressive ”desk“ dictionary, though not to the level of an unabridged Lewis & Short, as you mention.

zahadum

33 posts since
Aug 26, 2005

23. Jun 20, 2008 10:12 AM

in response to: ultralingua

Re: Ultralingua 7.0.1

the sales rep from ultralingual is living in a bubble if she(?) thinks that the constructive criticisms posted her on macworld are from a "tough audience"!

your customers are your most /forgiving/ audience! .... it is all the people who do /not/ buy your product that are your toughest sell because by definition they are totally unsatisfied. You really need to get some perspective! ....

you have been given a free ride here - all of the comments are very minor!

serious issues would have been the really (technicallY) hard stuff like when will you have a real cbt platform (api / sdk) -- when will you have support for standards eg LOM (Learning Object Model) & SCORM (testing methodology) ... let alone nexgen stuff like RDF-based agent languages applied to learning platforms OIL+DAML - eg KIF (knowledge interchange format). This is the sort of stuff that requires a room full of Phd's ... and you give the impression that your engineering dept would be hard pressed to find someone who knows how to use UML properly!

instead of embracing the challenges offered by your customers, you whinge about how you dont have enough management horsepower to negotiate licenses for new datasets ...

or you protest that your CFO cant raise enough capital to fund you properly, and as a result you are too small to supply all the products demanded by the marketplace!

WOW.

business is not about making excuses: it is about producing results!

so get down to work .... and set your priorities! ... and since you asked::

chinese ... all the asian languages are no-brainer! That is OBVIOUSLY the most important thing to focus on before wasting energy fiddling with minor european languages!

latin ... schoolboys need to study the classics (which include greek & hebrew) - so that is a no-brainer as well.

and remember:

1) good romanization (glyph input & rendering) is vital

2) top quality TTS is essential if you want people to pay serious money for any language system - so u will need to work with apple to integrate more languages in osx on the mac --- and to make the business case for apple to include TTS on the iphone/itouch!

How is it you have not snapped up some mega suits to do volume licensing into the education marketplace?!

ultralingua

6 posts since
Jun 13, 2008

24. Jun 20, 2008 10:24 AM

in response to: zahadum

Re: Ultralingua 7.0.1

The "tough audience" comment was light-hearted. Please insert <ironic> </ironic> tags as appropriate.

Please don't confuse "explanations" with "excuses."

When you find a company that can handle all the described projects simultaneously, please let us know. We already have a roomful of PhDs, so I don't believe the problem lies there.

In any case, please send us suggestions via our web form (see previous post), as we can't answer them all here.

Thanks!

bkazez

7 posts since
Sep 28, 2005

25. Jun 28, 2008 8:57 PM

in response to: Macworld

Re: Ultralingua 7.0.1

By the way, you can actually add multiple sets for each dictionary: File > New Flashcard Set.

fedupwithscams

2 posts since
Jul 4, 2008

26. Jul 23, 2008 2:30 PM

in response to: ultralingua

Re: Ultralingua 7.0.1

Ultralingua has received a lot of bad press on internet forums, and it is well-deserved. The lack of backward compatiblity when new modules are added to older ones is unconscionable. In my case, I purchased the English, English-French, and English French medical modules and used them for a year. Then I added the English-Spanish module, only to find that it inactivated the three modules I already had! By the time I figured out that this was a company policy and not the result of my installing it wrong, the English-Spanish module had also been upgraded to a new version. Since Ultralingua won't sell me an older version of the English-Spanish module that would be compatible with my preexisting modules, I would have to re-purchase all four modules in order to be able to use them together on the same device! To top it all off, they don't give you any warning when you add a new module (something like "Warning! All your old dictionaries will become useless when you add a new module, and you'll have to pay us $25 each to make them work again!"). They just let customers "figure it out" by themselves.

I read this thread carefully, including the Ultralingua rep's claim that upgrades represent "subsantial" improvements to databases, and that this justifies charging former customers for upgrades. This is a straw-man argument. People don't expect to have free upgrades. What they expect, and deserve, is that newer .prc files will be reverse-compatible with older .pdb files when they add new modules to their old dictionaries. Every other company selling software figured this out a long time ago. For example, when I upgrade to a new version of OSX, I don't have to buy an upgrade for Safari, because the new OSX recognises and works with the older version of Safari.

What really surprises me is that these clowns at Ultralingua think they can get away with sleazy business practices like this in the internet age. They may be the only game in town, but if they really think they're going to make more money ripping people off than they will lose by getting slammed on the internet, then they are even more foolish than I was when I bought their product. I won't pay them any more of my hard-earned money, and I hope that when potential customers search the internet for advice on Ultralingua, they'll find posts like mine and think twice. Now that's a payback!

fedupwithscams

2 posts since
Jul 4, 2008

27. Jul 24, 2008 4:46 PM

in response to: fedupwithscams

Re: Ultralingua 7.0.1

I see that my previous post has been sanitized. This suggests that Ultralingua would rather pay its attorneys to send legal threats to the moderators of Macworld than invest in improving its pathetic customer service. However, there is a conspicuous absence of a reasoned response to my post by the Ultralingua representative who has frequented this forum in the past.

Ultralingua, I hereby challenge you to address my arguments on their merits, an not resort to the cheesy underhanded tactic of coercing moderators to edit the posts of customers like me who compain legitimately that you have ripped them off.

I'm waiting.

kellie

552 posts since
Oct 11, 2007

28. Jul 25, 2008 10:56 AM

in response to: fedupwithscams

Re: Ultralingua 7.0.1

I am not sure what you mean by "sanitized", and I am checking with the Macworld moderators to see who, if anyone, modified your post. However, I can tell you this -- we were not contacted by Ultralingua (either their representatives or their attorneys) to modify your post (or anyone else's). There were no threats or coercion from Ultralingua at all.

Kellie | Online Community Manager

jazzman

4 posts since
Aug 18, 2008

29. Aug 19, 2008 4:21 AM

in response to: fedupwithscams

Re: Ultralingua 7.0.1

fedupwithscams wrote:

I think if I were a moderator on this forum, I would do more than just a little 'sanitizing' of your contribution, if only for the language level.

What if UL were to ask you to come into the open and make your cheesy, and totally underhanded allegations of scam under your real name? I got a free trial before deciding whether to buy it. Didn't you? Or did they scam you there as well? My humble advice to such cynicism is is to never buy anything, anywhere, ever.

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