Hanping Chinese Dictionary Pro 3.0.4 released!

April 12th, 2012
  • Added setting to Prefer Chinese Results (only applicable with ABC English-Chinese installed).  You can still switch search result language by clicking on the top-left icon.  This will be made more intuitive in an up-coming update
  • Faster lists
  • Searches also update in Browse screen
  • Some bug fixes

Available from the Google Play Store.

Hanping Chinese Dictionary Lite 3.0.1 released!

March 17th, 2012

Note: 3.0.1 fixes some bugs in 3.0 (which is described in this post).

This major update brings in several features that Hanping Pro users have been enjoying for over a year:

  • Starred words – star any word (or even a phrase not in the dictionary) for easy recall later on
  • Clipboard support – copy any Chinese headword to Clipboard to use outside of the app (e.g. in email/sms app)
  • External links (only when you are online) – quickly & conveniently look up a word in one of the many supported 3rd party websites such as YellowBridge (for detailed word information), nciku (for sample sentences), Skritter (for stroke animations & writing practice) and many more
  • Lookup Chinese words within dictionary definitions
  • Lookup characters within headwords

 

Other improvements include:

  • Search term is highlighted in results, when searching English
  • Improved support for long phrases/sentences.  Try pasting a Chinese SMS into the search box and you get instant Pinyin and Simplified/Traditional conversion, as well as all the vocab!
  • You can now disable ads (see Settings screen)

 

So why buy the Pro version?

  • Chinese handwriting recognition:  This is much more convenient than using a 3rd party IME, not just because it is built directly into the Search screen but also because it waits for you after each stroke!
  • Homescreen widgets:  Have one, two, three (or as many as you like) widgets on your homescreen to test/remind yourself of the words that are important to you.  You assign a Hanping word list to each widget so you can test yourself on all your starred words, or just the ones with a certain tag, or maybe use a predefined word list such as frequent characters or popular idioms.
  • Audio by a real native Chinese speaker:  Over 2,000 single-syllable audio files with support for Erhua variants.  These are designed for the beginner, so are spoken slowly and clearly
  • Multi-dictionary support.  If you want your dictionary defintions to have more grammar and sample sentences then you need to  invest in a high quality dictionary!  The superb ABC Chinese-English & ABC English-Chinese dictionaries are available as separate in-app purchases.  We have worked very hard to integrate these seamlessly into the app.  So, no need to cycle through dictionaries to find the word you are looking for. Instead, Hanping Pro merges the results so you can see everything in one go
  • Last but not least, Hanping Pro is, for a limited time, on special offer – HALF PRICE!

 

SMS breakdown

SMS breakdown

Browse Screen

Browse Screen is now in Hanping Lite

 

Hanping Lite is available from the Google Play Store.

 

We hope you like these new changes and are always grateful for your feedback.

Many thanks,

embermitre

Hanping Chinese Dictionary Pro 3.0.3 released!

March 12th, 2012
3.0.3 is a minor bug fix update on 3.0/3.0.1/3.0.2 fixing an in-app billing crash, minor handwriting issues and a crash on startup on some old Motorola devices.  Other recent changes are:
  • Improved sentence decomposition – for example, try pasting a Chinese SMS into the search box
  • Merged dictionary search (only relevant if you have ABC Chinese-English dictionary installed) – gives you the combined results for CC-CEDICT and ABC Chinese-English
  • Both ABC dictionaries (which are currently on SPECIAL OFFER) now include both Simplified & Traditional characters as well as Pinyin & Zhuyin! *
  • Improved search engine
  • (ABC English-Chinese only) when searching English, can now switch (using top-left icon) between English and Chinese headword results
  • When searching English, search word is now highlighted in bold in the search results
  • Better support for Android Intents – i.e. better interoperability with other apps
  • About screen now shows for each dictionary whether there is an update available
  • General improvements and some bug fixes
* If you have already purchased/downloaded one or both ABC dictionaries then you can update to the latest version from the About screen (Menu button > About). There you should see an “Update available” message. Touch that to install the latest dictionary. You need to do this once for each dictionary that needs updating.

A quick word on Sentence Decomposition…

It’s been over a year now since we introduced the functionality to type a long phrase/sentence into the search box and automatically show the corresponding vocab list (breakdown). You could also see the phrase/sentence in it’s entirety by clicking on the “not in dictionary” item.

Now, we’ve gone one step further.  As you type (or paste) Chinese text into the search box, Hanping automatically works out the Pinyin/Zhuyin. Furthermore, if your settings are set up to show both Simplified & Traditional characters, you will also see the Simplified/Traditional variants.  In other words, you now get automatic Simplified-Traditional-Pinyin/Zhuyin conversion!

Here is the result of pasting a typical Chinese (Simplified form) SMS message:

 

And here is a more extreme example where the same Simplified SMS message is used, but the Settings are configured to show Traditional [Simplified] & Zhuyin!

Available from the Google Play Store.

Hanping Chinese Dictionary Pro hits 10,000 downloads on Android Market!

January 7th, 2012

Today, Hanping Chinese Dictionary Pro hit the magic 10,000 downloads mark on the Android Market!

We believe this is the first paid offline dictionary to achieve this :)

For posterity, here is the User Reviews breakdown:

A big thanks to all the support we have received over the last couple of years to make this happen.

UPDATE 28.01.2012: Free version hits HALF A MILLION downloads!

Hanping Chinese Dictionary Pro 2.8.2 released!

January 3rd, 2012
  • Refreshed app icon
  • Added English starred words functionality (only relevant if ABC English-Chinese installed) – from Starred Tab, touch top-left icon to switch between Chinese and English starred lists
  • Fixed FC (ICS-only) when swiping on Browse screen
  • Minor bug fixes

Available from the Android Market.

Hanping Chinese Dictionary Pro 2.8.1 released!

December 20th, 2011

This contains a few minor bug fixes to the recently-released 2.8.0 which added support for the ABC English-Chinese Dictionary (as in-app purchase).

  • Fixed CC-CEDICT deep-search bug
  • Fixed bug when switching to new SD card – dictionaries were being installed in an order that caused some problems
  • Fixed Share feature for ABC English-Chinese Dictionary

Available from the Android Market.

Hanping Chinese Dictionary Pro 2.8.0 released!

December 18th, 2011
  • Added ABC English-Chinese in-app purchase (~10USD). Press Menu button > Buy for more details
  • Improved Search screen header: now much cleaner
  • Minor bug fixes
A few weeks ago we launched the ABC Chinese-English Dictionary as an in-app purchase. Now, we are launching the other way with the superb ABC English-Chinese Dictionary.  This is something we’ve wanted to add for ages because doing English lookups on a Chinese-English dictionary (CC-CEDICT) is never going to match on the less common English words. Having a dictionary with English headwords makes a huge difference to the user experience for those who frequently search using English.
Here are the highlights:
  • Over 62,000 English headwords
  • 6,400 example sentences translated into both Simplified & Traditional Chinese and Pinyin
  • Grammatical information such as Part of Speech

When you search using English, Hanping Pro performs a lookup on the ABC English-Chinese dictionary first. If no exact matches are found then the search falls back to the CC-CEDICT dictionary. The icon in the top-left of the screen indicates which dictionary was used to give the current search results.

Please note, this dictionary does not currently include a Chinese index, so searching by Chinese will still only give results from the CC-CEDICT dictionary (or ABC Chinese-English dictionary if you have that installed).  We are looking to improve on this in the near future.

Currently, it is not possible to star English words. This will be coming shortly. In the meantime, use the History to refer back to English words you have previously looked up.

As with app purchases, you only need to purchase the ABC English-Chinese Dictionary once to then use on all of your devices. The purchase is linked to your Google account, so any Android device where you are signed into the Google account (and has Android Market, which is used to check the license), will have access to the paid dictionary.

Android Market issues are the same as with app purchases. If you are in China/Taiwan, you will probably need to do a sim swap to make the purchase. This is a pain but only needs to be done once. Please read this for more details.

Known issues:

  • If you are running CyanogenMod then you may experience a problem in the formatting of the ABC entry (where the indentation is collapsed). This makes longer entries slightly more difficult to read and also results in misaligned highlighting when clicking on links. We suspect most users won’t find this much of a problem and hopefully CM will fix this in the near future.

Available from the Android Market.

Hanping Chinese Dictionary Lite 2.7.3 released!

December 6th, 2011
  • Pro version now offers superb ABC Chinese-English Dictionary as in-app purchase
  • Added dialog explaining how to get Pro version in China
  • Minor bug fixes

Available from the Android Market.

Hanping Chinese Dictionary Pro 2.7.3 released!

December 5th, 2011
  • Fixed Pinyin ü bug (recently-introduced bug that was causing problems with colouring the Hanzi)
  • Improved About screen (merged Installed Dictionaries and Purchased Dictionaries into one Dictionaries section)
  • Minor bug fixes
Available from the Android Market.

Hanping Chinese Dictionary Pro 2.7.2 released!

December 3rd, 2011
  • Improved formatting of ABC entries (see screenshot)
  • Clicking on individual Hanzi in headword is now more intelligent
  • Fixed potential startup delay caused by looking for custom fonts
  • Minor bug fixes

Available from the Android Market.