February 20, 2010
Apple has recently announced the upcoming release of their new iPad device. It’s a very exciting and compelling product and AccelaStudy is being updated now to run on this beautiful new platform.
Unlike some of our competitors, AccelaStudy will continue to be available for iPhone, iPod touch, and the new iPad all in the same product. This means that if you have an iPhone or iPod touch and also buy an iPad, AccelaStudy will run perfectly on all of these devices.
But that’s not all. The next version of AccelaStudy will have a gorgeous new user interface which takes advantage of the unique features and larger screen available on the iPad.
We’re very excited about this new platform.
February 20, 2010
AccelaStudy has recently been updated to include a new universal translator feature which works with Google Translate to translate any text that you enter, including individual words, sentences, and even paragraphs.
This new Translate feature is based off of the free, award-winning Translate Now! by AccelaStudy product which has been downloaded over 250,000 times in less than 2 months!
Unlike the rest of the AccelaStudy program, this Translate feature requires an active Internet connection to access the Google Translate service.
February 20, 2010
AccelaStudy has recently been expanded to include support for the Arabic and Hebrew languages!
Both Arabic and Hebrew include:
- Over 2,300 basic and advanced vocabulary words from more than 60 subject areas.
- Native speaker audio for each and every word.
- Over 150 of the most commonly used verbs.
- And all of the other great features of AccelaStudy including spaced repetition, search, and audio quiz.
AccelaStudy applications with Arabic and Hebrew run on both iPhone and iPod touch devices with the iPhone OS 3.0 or later installed. Due to the lack of right-to-left language support in earlier versions of the iPhone OS, OS 3.0 or later is required.
July 7, 2009
Version 1.4.4 has been released and is now appearing in the iTunes App Store. Version 1.4.4 is primarily a stability release to correct a number of issues that arose during the compatibility changes made for the iPhone OS 3.0. There are also performance enhancements particularly noticeable in improved scrolling speed of the search results.
The next update, Version 1.5, will include additional features and, finally, also new vocabulary – verbs! The total vocabulary set will increase by about 25%.
July 1, 2009
We’re very interested in learning how many of our users have upgraded to the new OS and who is holding back. We know that the upgrade for iPod Touch users is $9.95 US and for some that may be a sticking point. We want to move AccelaStudy to the new OS soon but we don’t want to leave behind our customers. Please visit our support forum at Upgrading to the New OS 3.0? and let your voice be heard!
April 16, 2009
Version 1.4 is a huge success and it’s available to try for free, now in the iTunes App Store! You can find the following applications:
- FREE Chinese Essentials by AccelaStudy
- FREE Dutch Essentials by AccelaStudy
- FREE French Essentials by AccelaStudy
- FREE German Essentials by AccelaStudy
- FREE Greek Essentials by AccelaStudy
- FREE Italian Essentials by AccelaStudy
- FREE Japanese Essentials by AccelaStudy
- FREE Korean Essentials by AccelaStudy
- FREE Polish Essentials by AccelaStudy
- FREE Portuguese Essentials by AccelaStudy
- FREE Romanian Essentials by AccelaStudy
- FREE Russian Essentials by AccelaStudy
- FREE Spanish Essentials by AccelaStudy
- FREE Turkish Essentials by AccelaStudy
- FREE Ukrainian Essentials by AccelaStudy
Essentials by AccelaStudy are exactly the same as the paid version of AccelaStudy but with a reduced set of vocabulary words and audio files.
After only 5 days in the App Store, 5 of the Essentials applications are already in the Top 100 Free downloads in the Education category with FREE Spanish Essentials already in the Top 20!
Thanks to all of our customers whose feedback has helped make AccelaStudy a stunning success!
FREE Essentials by AccelaStudy are available now in the iTunes App Store.
April 2, 2009
AccelaStudy version 1.4 has been approved by Apple and is now live in the App Store. Version 1.4 is a massive update with all of the following features now available:
- Audio Quiz Mode. Hear a word and choose the word you heard from the list of answers. This feature is particularly useful for languages which do not use the Roman alphabet.
- Spaced Repetition Mode. AccelaStudy 1.4 now truly accelerates your learning with the new spaced repetition mode. Spaced repetition automatically tracks which words you know and which words you are learning and helps you focus on the words you are learning. In our testing, students have learned at > 1 word per minute using spaced repetition.
- Completely new user interface. As described in an earlier post here, the user interface of AccelaStudy has been completely redesigned for better usability and expandability as we add new features to the application in the coming weeks and months.
- Audio downloading. This design change deserves a post of its own but the key point is that after initially downloading the application from the App Store, the audio files are not initially available. Once the app is launched, simply navigate to Download Audio on the home screen to download all of the expected audio files. A WiFi network connection is highly recommended. The AccelaStudy application could no longer include audio files in the App Store updates because the resulting application size was far too large for most users, i.e. those accessing the App Store via WiFi and 3G networks. The audio files only need to be downloaded once and will persist through future updates to the application. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this change may cause our existing customers.
- Add categories to study sets. You can now add the words from one or more categories to a study set at once.
- Add words to study sets. As you navigate through words in Study Mode, Flashcard Mode, or Spaced Repetition Mode, you can now take the current word and add it to any of your other study sets without leaving your current mode.
- Search results with audio. When you search for a word, the matching search results display in both languages of the application. Now, when tapping the Play icon in the search result, the application will play audio for the first language with the first tap and audio for the second language with the second tap.
Unfortunately, what this update does not have is new vocabulary, audio, or verbs. These are all still coming soon and we will have several major announcements to this end in the coming weeks. However, the user interface redesign and the offloading of the audio files to external servers became a very high priority over the last two months and needed to be done before expanding any further.
As always, please contact support@accelastudy.com with any questions, concerns, or other feedback.
March 14, 2009
We are wrapping up the final testing of version 1.4 of AccelaStudy and wanted to share a screen capture of the new UI:
As you can see, it is a lot different than all previous versions of AccelaStudy. As many of our customers know, we have quite a few features that we are planning (some of which are in 1.4) and the reality is that the old UI did not give us a lot of room to grow.
Gone is the tab bar at the bottom of the screen. Instead, there is a new launch screen which provides easy access to all of the features of the application. Since we are no longer confined to 4 or 5 buttons at the bottom, we can make it easy to navigate as many features as the application grows to.
As you can imagine, recreating the UI of the application took quite a bit of time. But we felt the investment in this was necessary in order to help us deliver some of the key features we know you are all waiting for.
This screen may still change a bit before the final release goes out but we think we’re on the right track. As always, please email us with any thoughts or comments you have.
January 1, 2009
Happy New Year to all of our customers! We finally completed v1.3 of AccelaStudy and submitted the first audio-enabled versions of AccelaStudy a few days ago. All languages except Polish have been recorded and prepared for the device. Polish will be recorded in early January and available before the end of the month.
There are a few reasons why we were so long in getting v1.3 completed. The main reason has to do with a trade off between the quality of the audio files and the size of the application that is installed on the device.
Most of our voice talents record the individual words at a very high sample rate. The higher the sample rate, the more precise the recording. Of course, at the highest sample rate, the recording is more detailed than any human can differentiate. But at the lowest sample rate, important inflections, accents, and other nuances can be lost.
The drawback to a high sample rate is the size of the audio file. Each AccelaStudy product has 2 languages – German and English, for example. The current vocabulary list is approximately 2,100 words. Each of these words is recorded in German and English, resulting in approximately 4,200 audio files. The unedited audio files for all of these words takes up approximately 1.4 GB of disk space. That is a massive iPhone application, especially considering there are still some early iPhones out there with only 4 GB of total storage. Also, considering that the eventual vocabulary size of each AccelaStudy product will be over 6,000 words (12,000 audio files), the size of the audio files really needs to be reduced.
The best way to reduce audio file size is to compress the audio. The best compressed format is MP3. Unfortunately, there are a number of drawbacks to using MP3 in an audio-enabled application on the iPhone. MP3 audio is expanded on-the-fly by hardware on the iPhone. Due to this dependency on hardware resources, the device can only play one MP3 audio file at once – the hardware cannot be shared between applications. So if a user is playing some nice background music on the iPhone and then AccelaStudy runs and tries to play an audio file, the background music is stopped and then the audio file plays. The background music does not resume – it is as if the Stop button was pressed. We know a lot of our customers listen to music while studying vocabulary. Clearly, MP3 was not the right choice.
In the end, we stayed with uncompressed PCM audio (.wav files) with a reduced sample rate. The sample rate is still very high relative to the audio files used by others and still results in a hefty application size at around 200 MB for each AccelaStudy application. However, we believe that our customers will find our audio recordings very clear and static-free and a pleasure to listen to, even over long study sessions.
The audio in AccelaStudy stands out in a few other ways as well:
- For all languages where it is appropriate (Spanish, German, etc.) the definite article is also recorded. So the German word “Nachmittag” is displayed and recorded as “der Nachmittag”.
- For languages with words that differ by gender, all gender variations are recorded as separate audio files but chained together. So “der Verwalter” and “die Verwalterin” are recorded individually but played back with masculine first, followed by the feminine. Neuter variations are also provided where appropriate.
- Recordings of both languages are provided for all words. So for German | English, the English word is recorded as well as all variations of the German word. For German words with masculine, feminine, and neuter forms, this results in FOUR actual recordings for a single “word”. As far as we know, AccelaStudy is the only application out there that does this.
We have more audio features planned for future releases. We will post here when we are ready to announce them.
As always, please feel free to share your thoughts and concerns at support@accelastudy.com!
December 14, 2008
The latest releases of AccelaStudy Russian | English and AccelaStudy Polish | English are now in the App Store and available for download or purchase.
This brings these apps finally in line with the rest of the AccelaStudy line of foreign language products. Additionally, we are just finishing the audio recordings for Russian and Polish so these applications will go to v1.3 with the rest of the AccelaStudy products later in December.
