AccelaStudy Romanian has been approved by Apple and is now available in the App Store! AccelaStudy Romanian joins the AccelaStudy family in v1.0.3 with a starting vocabulary of over 2,100 words.
As you may have noticed, our website has been pretty plain since its inception. This blog is using a pretty standard theme. All in all, the AccelaStudy web presence is a bit lacking.
So we wanted to announce that a new website and a new blog is coming very soon! We’ve been working with award-winning designer Tony Geer for several weeks and a gorgeous and intuitive design is getting close to being approved. We’re very happy with the work and are looking forward to seeing it come alive here soon.
Having a new website will allow us to provide a lot more information to potential customers, as well as better support and help for existing customers. We hope that you will find it useful. As always, we look forward to any feedback you want to share.
v1.0.5 of AccelaStudy Japanese is now in final testing. The following modifications and features have been added:
We expect to finish final testing on Monday or Tuesday and will submit v1.0.5 to Apple for review shortly thereafter. It typical takes 5-6 days for Apple to review an application so we look forward to v1.0.5 in the App Store some time in the 2nd week of September.
We recently posted here regarding a particular AS Japanese review and its good feedback. As you may know, we are also launching AccelaStudy Chinese in the App Store shortly. AccelaStudy Chinese is similar to AccelaStudy Japanese in the way it renders text in the user interface. The first version – v1.0.4 – has already gone out but we are preparing v1.0.5 right now for both Chinese and Japanese to address the feedback received last night. The feedback for AccelaStudy Japanese is already resulting in product improvements in AccelaStudy Chinese.
Additionally, we have broken up into two teams here now. One team is responsible for AccelaStudy Chinese and AccelaStudy Japanese and the other team gets everything else, for now. This is to facilitate new and powerful features for these language products which would not have benefit in any other product.
For example, we have decided to place a significant emphasis on the use of AccelaStudy Japanese for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, all four levels. This test is a very rigorous and daunting goal for any serious Japanese student. Simple flash cards will not be enough help. The exam has difficult sections which test listening and reading comprehension. New tools need to be created. So expect AccelaStudy Japanese to quickly evolve to support this challenging endeavor.
In case you were wondering, we watch the reviews in the App Store almost 24 hours a day. There are only a few early morning hours where a review might get in that we don’t immediately catch. And right now, so far appearing only on the iPhone App Store (not visible on the computer-based iTunes App Store yet) we have a fantastic 2-star review coming in from G. Mutato on AccelaStudy Japanese. Yes, that’s 2 stars, which is pretty bad, actually. It’s a long and detailed review and as soon as we can, we will copy and paste the review right here:
[2-star review to be inserted here shortly]
However, what we love most is when a user gives us feedback that helps us take our products in the direction of improvement. This review, albeit somewhat scathing with regard to some key interface choices we have made, is exactly that. It is excellent feedback on what turns out to be a bad user interface for learning Kanji and Hiragana. G. Mutato has made it clear that the fonts we render the Kanji and Hiragana in are too small. They are difficult to read. Given the complexity of the Kanji a user is trying to learn, this is – in G. Mutato’s words – an “absolute sin“.
We agree.
In retrospect, it doesn’t take too long to realize that the fonts are too small. The characters are too hard to read.
So we are already working on making those fonts bigger and more readable, even “easily readable”. In fact, you can depend on it that we will get the job done and deliver vastly improved readability in the AccelaStudy Japanese product very soon. We’re aiming for a release within 7 days.
Thank you, G. Mutato, for this invaluable feedback. As you may know, Apple has not yet come up with a way for developers to release their software in a beta form for users to try out and provide feedback. The App Store is the ultimate proving ground. There is no warm up, no practice run. We submit what we think is a good product and hope others think so too. But until someone posts a review like this, we really don’t know what other people think about our products. So this review, even though it hits hard, is really what we needed. Again, our thanks.
If anyone else has anything to say – good, bad, or ugly – please let us know. Feel free to post wherever you like but we highly recommend our forums at http://support.accelastudy.com.
We introduced a minor defect in the AccelaStudy applications which have been updated to v1.0.3:
The issue is that the application won’t let you deselect more than 20 or so categories. Once it gets to this number, it thinks that you are deselecting the last category and won’t let you deselect any more.
The defect occurs only to users who are upgrading from v1.0 and only AccelaStudy Spanish and AccelaStudy Japanese are affected. If you just purchased either of these applications, the issue will not affect you.
There is a simple workaround which permanently fixes the issue. However, we have also made an additional permanent change to the application which fixes the issue and have already submitted a new v1.0.4 to Apple for review, hopefully posting in record time to the App Store (but the average has been 5-7 days).
The workaround is to temporarily delete the application from your iPhone (or iPod Touch) and resync the application back to your device. Detailed steps are available here:
We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this has caused. Please contact support at support@accelastudy.com if you need further assistance.
There are a few updates that we want to share with you tonight. First, the updates are taking more time getting Apple approval than prior updates. We’re looking at 5-7 days for an application to go through the full Apple review cycle before we get the email from them that an application update is moving into the store. After that, it is taking, on average, another 9 hours before we actually see the update in the store. The updates show up in the iTunes application usually hours before they show up as updates in the App Store application on the device. This is all fine – we know Apple puts a lot of work into reviewing applications – but it does make timing updates a bit tricky.
So far we have posted updates for AccelaStudy Vocabulary Builder, AccelaStudy Spanish (which hadn’t had an update since the opening day of the App Store), and AccelaStudy Japanese. The first two are out in the store but the latter is still in that “9 hour” window. We hope to see it Saturday morning.
We have AccelaStudy Dutch, AccelaStudy German, and the new AccelaStudy Romanian ready to go. They will be submitted for review on Saturday morning. We were hoping to have Romanian ready for the launch of the iPhone 3G in Romania today but based on the above statements, it will hopefully be in the store by next weekend.
AccelaStudy Italian and AccelaStudy French are up for Sunday, along with the new and previously unannounced AccelaStudy Chinese! Chinese will release with 2,200 vocabulary words in English, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, and Pinyin. We are learning from our experience with Japanese and are making all word forms available in Chinese from day 1.
AccelaStudy Turkish and AccelaStudy Portuguese will go into review on Monday. That leaves AccelaStudy Polish and AccelaStudy Russian for later in the week.
As noted in the release notes for v1.0.3 (the latest update) we are moving toward a regular vocabulary update schedule. Most updates will have 50-150 words each but there will be others with larger sets. The upcoming medical vocabulary, for example, is much larger.
As an aside, why a larger medical vocabulary? We’ve learned that there is a great need for doctors in the United States who can communicate in Spanish with patients. The words needed for a successful conversation are a bit beyond the average Spanish class textbook. We believe that AccelaStudy, with the mobility and convenience of the iPhone (and iPod Touch), is the perfect way for these busy professionals to pick up new, needed vocabulary without spending a lot of time in front of a computer. AccelaStudy cannot (for now) replace a solid education in Spanish grammar but it can help you learn the vocabulary words you need to be an effective communicator. (All products will be getting the medical vocabulary, however, not just Spanish.)
We welcome all user feedback on the direction of AccelaStudy products. Are there words you need for your work? Let us know. Are there features the product could have that would make it more effective for your learning? Let us know. iPhone software is NEW software. Every application in the App Store on July 11th was version 1.0. User feedback is very important in taking new software and guiding it to maturity.
We have had a lot of comments about the price of our applications. All of the AccelaStudy applications are $14.99 in the United States. This is 2-3x higher than other “competing” products in the App Store. Why so high? The reason is that we are adding thousands of words to the application, thousands of verbal pronunciations, personalized and effective learning techniques, and additional tools and exercises to help take a language student and lead them to fluency. We’re in this for the long term. Where now our customers may feel the price is steep, we want them to feel six months from now that they got a bargain with an application much more valuable than the price paid.
As always, thanks for reading and check back here for more AccelaStudy news.
It’s been a very busy month for AccelaStudy. We finally got the first month’s sales numbers from Apple and they are outstanding. Thousands of copies of AccelaStudy’s various versions have been sold through the App Store and we’ve gotten great feedback from our customers.
Next week (depending on the speed at which Apple approves our updates), we will be releasing updates for ALL of the AccelaStudy foreign language products. The new versions will include the following:
That’s what is coming next week. We have exciting plans for the future also:
Thanks for making AccelaStudy a resounding success! We look forward to many more updates in the future.
We’ve decided to rapidly increase the rate at which new vocabulary words are introduced into the AccelaStudy foreign language products. Previously we were planning on introducing 100-200 words per month with a goal of getting to 2,000 words within a year. Now, we will be increasing the number of vocabulary words per language to over 2,000 in the next month or so with more words planned.
Users have spoken and we are listening. The #1 requested feature for AccelaStudy foreign language applications is audio pronunciations, i.e. sound. We’re pleased to announce that we will be implementing audio pronunciations for most languages in an upcoming fall release, just in time for the back-to-school rush. We are currently working on optimizing the recording process and will keep you posted on this blog. All pronunciations will be provided by a native speaker. Audio pronunciations will, of course, be a free update to all users and will make the product an even more compelling value at $14.99 USD.
