Word Magic Compact English-Spanish Dictionary app

Parent blog entry: http://kenamored.blogspot.com/2011/04/free-spanish-dictionary-apps.html

3/17/14: Somewhere along the line to its current version 5.4.1, this app switched from being free to being paid. That probably explains why, for an app that I got for free, it's so good.

This free app (version 2.0.2) has a limited subset of the material in the paid version (Word Magic English-Spanish Reference Dictionary, which has a healthy 4.5 / 5 stars from 82 ratings on 10/30/11), and may be adequate for occasional look up of common words. If you need a more complete dictionary, you may need to upgrade to the paid version (which the app makes sure you know is an option!), or find another more complete app. For someone like me, who occasionally listens to Claudia Fernandez' basic Spanish podcasts, it can be helpful as is.

Ads run in the free app.

Search pops up a row of the full range of possible accented letters (áéíóúüñ). iOS natively allows those accented letters to be entered, so that is not necessary, but it can speed up entry of words.
The x at the end of the row is to cease text entry in Search, but it looks quite weird, since it's just another letter, in the same font and size appearance as the other accented ones!

All these accented letter possibilities are enumerated, with useful usage details, in the old but free and still useful Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar, which I mentioned here.

4/2/11 was the last day of a promotional 25% off sale for their $7.99 General Reference product. I think they have run sales more than just that once.

11/26/11: For a free Spanish-Spanish dictionary, see this blog entry.

iOS 4 vs iOS 5: podcasts

What was named the iPod app under iOS 4 on the iPad was split into a Music app and a Videos app under iOS 5 on the iPad.  The Music app functionality in iOS 5 on an iPad is SIGNIFICANTLY different from, and inferior to, its former functionality, at least with respect to podcasts.

Having upgraded my iPod to iOS 5, for the most part I have not noticed any loss of podcast functionality compared to iOS 4.  I think the following is a new iOS 5 improvement:  when playing a podcast while a Passcode Locked iPod is in sleep mode, press the Home button twice to bring up selected touchscreen controls which can be used without unlocking the iPod.  Back, Pause, Forward, and Volume are available.  Back and Forward allow you to move between consecutive (previously downloaded) episodes of a podcast series, although according to my recollection, under certain circumstances (related to the actual podcast?), Back would start the same podcast over from the beginning.  The iPod's physical volume buttons, which are always active, are often still easier to use than the touchscreen volume slider, at least when starting from sleep mode.

2/8/12: I just stumbled upon what I think is another favorable change in iOS 5.0.1 from iOS 4.  If you have 2 or more podcasts from a single series saved, when the last one is finished playing, the first one starts playing.  According to my recollection, under iOS 4, the podcasts would stop playing after the last one in a series.  This new(?) behavior may not be everyone's preference, but since I mostly listen to podcasts repeatedly for French language instruction, I'm glad for such podcasts to play in an infinite loop.

7/8/12: My blog entry about the iOS 5.1 Podcasts app. Usage of that app may make some of what I've written here obsolete, but I'm not planning to revise this blog entry any further related to that.

If you manually subscribe to podcasts strictly over-the-air (i.e., you don't use pc-based iTunes for any part of such subscribing), getting those podcasts can be more hassle in iOS 5 on an iPad than on any of:

• iOS 4 iPad
• iOS 4 iPod
• iOS 5 iPod

For the 3 (French language instruction) podcasts I follow, I manually download each episode directly over WiFi to my iPod, typically once a week, downloading all 3 podcasts' new episodes at the same time. I keep each episode forever, and have listened to a number of them more than once -- repetition is helpful for learning languages. I suppose I can count myself lucky that I'm manually subscribing to only 3 podcasts on my iPod, and not more, otherwise I'd have more manual downloading work.


Under iOS 4 on an iPod/iPad or under iOS 5 on an iPod:

If you have many episodes of a podcast series within the iPod's Music app (or the iPod app on an iOS 4 iPad), an effective way to get directly to the bottom of the list is to go back to all podcasts (tap the left-pointing Podcasts button), then select the desired podcast. If the list is long, this is faster than repeatedly swiping down a long list of episodes. Make mental note of the last episode's title and/or date; one of those should be sufficient to identify on the upcoming iTunes app screen what the next episode will be. Tap the Get More Episodes... link underneath the list, which will take you directly to the podcast within iTunes, then get your desired episodes.
12/31/11: Under iOS 5.0.1 on an iPod, this technique has worked less consistently than under iOS 4. Doing my usual weekly consecutive loading of episodes from 3 different podcast series, I have periodically needed to explicitly eject the iTunes app from RAM before it will do what I want when I tap the Get More Episodes... link. On one occasion, while downloading the second podcast series' (half-hour) episode, the iTunes app crashed when I simultaneously tried to have it display the new podcasts from the third podcast series. My iPod's total podcast episodes (including some outside my primary 3 podcast series) number around 500 now, but I don't believe that should really have impacted the robustness of this technique.

As usual, you can press the time display (hh:mm) in the top middle of the iPod to go directly to the top of the list.

Under iOS 5 on an iPad:

There seems to be no way to go directly from a podcast within the Music app to its matching section of the iTunes app (the better, perhaps, for Apple to expose you to whatever is being prominently advertised on the "front page" of iTunes). You have to go to the Podcasts section, then type in the name of the podcast for which you're looking, rather a drag compared to what you could do previously.

The visual presentation and handling of podcasts have changed, worse in basically every way:

• There is no way to see the text that the podcast creator has included! The full text of the One thing in a French Day podcast is included and is visible in the Music app (see my image here) on an iPod (the iPod app in some non-iPod environments), but it's not visible in iOS 5.0 on an iPad!! (Yes, IF you are connected to the Internet, you could go to her website for the text, but why should you have to, when she already included it with the podcast?)
• There are no options to change the speed to 1/2 or twice normal (6/2/12: This capability was restored in iOS 5.1.). The speaker for one particular (English language) podcast I downloaded speaks very slowly, and doubling his speed was a distinct and totally intelligible improvement.
• There is no button to rewind 30 seconds (6/2/12: This capability was restored in iOS 5.1.). I rarely used that, but there's always a chance it might have been handy.
• Tap-hold on the new rewind and fast forward buttons does not seem to work very smoothly. Ah, I later saw that those buttons were there under iOS 4, and I never noticed them. They apparently work similarly under iOS 4 and iOS 5: tap-hold on either one for a longer time and you will skip backward or forward, respectively, by a larger and larger amount the longer you hold.
• Although I never noticed it before working on this blog entry, iOS 4 also provides an additional, vertically compact (one line per episode), list view of the episodes alphabetized by title (not necessarily the same order as in the vertically less compact view showing the "album art"), showing what # each one is in the list, showing the total time, and allowing you to assign 1-5 stars to an episode. This additional list view is gone in iOS 5. In iOS 5, tap the small album art to the right of the fast forward button, tap on the now-big album art, and the list icon button can be accessed.

In iOS 5.0 on the iPad, Apple is incorrectly recording video storage under the Music app, instead of under the Videos app where it belongs.  I have 23 video podcasts saved according to Settings > General > About, but Settings > General > Usage > Video (spelling is inconsistent with the VideoS name of the app, but icon is the same) shows "No Data", which is incorrect.

An interesting article and subsequent comments about iOS 5 and podcasts:
http://www.carrypad.com/2011/06/10/ios-5-still-lacks-smart-podcast-handling/.
And a similarly interesting follow-up: http://www.carrypad.com/2011/10/12/hey-apple-ios-5-needs-newsstand-for-podcasts/.

The most exhaustive detail (article and comments) I have seen about the worsened functionality in the iOS 5 Music app on the iPad:

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/10/12/ios-5-features-changes-in-music-app-for-ipad/

I saw mention there of more lost functionality, which I subsequently experienced myself:

• You can no longer play episodes of the same podcast continuously.  I used to be able to play multiple episodes of Car Talk or Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me continuously, typically while doing household tasks.  Now I have to start playing each episode separately.  At least those shows are hour-long ones.  Separately starting each of my 3-5 minute French language instruction podcast episodes would be intolerable; fortunately, I normally listen to those on my iPod, which can still play them continuously.

Speedtest.net Mobile Speed Test

Check broadband speed with this free native iOS app. I had previously used Ookla's http://www.speedtest.net/ website from a PC browser to do the same thing, but checking broadband speed can often more conveniently be done on a mobile computing device. Their app stores results of your broadband speed tests, which you can export to CSV and e-mail.

My broadband speed is regrettably often erratic (both regrettably often erratic and regrettably often erratic), with recent high and low download speeds differing by more than a factor of 12. The Speedtest.net Mobile Speed Test app will help me keep an eye on my provider, who won't be my provider for long if they revisit that low end of broadband speed with any frequency.

You can get additional perspective by using the app to test broadband speed of any wireless Internet access to which you have access.

Difficulties in subtitling foreign language material

In the French language movie Queen To Play (2009), there is a sequence where characters recite chess moves.  One of those moves is Black's bishop to the g4 square, which is mistakenly subtitled "Bishop...j4", an impossible move.

To me that's a strong indication that the person doing the subtitles was not a native French speaker, and also did not know the algebraic notation of chess.  The sound of the French letter g is somewhat like the sound of the English letter j, so someone who was more used to English than French could easily have mistakenly chosen j, particularly if they didn't know that the algebraic notation letters for a square on the chessboard range only between a and h.  A native French speaker, however, is unlikely to write j if they have heard g, even if they knew nothing about chess algebraic notation.

In the French language movie Amélie (2001), one character is directing another character over the phone to a certain page in a book. The spoken French is "Page 51.", but the subtitle says "Page St.". That error seems like someone misread handwriting for 51 as St. I see now that this error (and others) are cited for this film at IMDB, under Goofs > Audio/visual unsynchronized, although my interest is more about the aspects of language underlying such errors, not the errors per se.

Subtitles in pirated works probably take even more of a beating.

In the movie Tape (2001), one character responds to another's question about what time it is with "It's quarter of.", without specifying the hour (i.e., quarter of what). The subtitle is "十五分" (15 minutes). There is no Chinese translation for "quarter of" if the hour is not specified, so this inaccurate subtitle is no surprise.

In Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999), a character says "They went down the ventilation shaft!". According to my memory, a pirated Chinese version used the subtitle "他们出去了" (simplified Chinese for "They went out!"), which lacks the flavor of the original sentence.


11/15/12: Translators rendering subtitles are always under text length limitations, and may be forced to make compromises. For example, not all languages have a single word for "siblings", as English does, and the character count is clearly higher for "brothers and sisters".

Three characters differentiated by the direction of a stroke

子 (zǐ, and also frequently zi [neutral tone]) is a very common character, whose final sideways stroke is horizontal.

孑孓 (jiéjué; mosquito larva) shows that the final sideways stroke can be made both tilting slightly upward from left to right, and also tilting slightly downward from left to right, each change resulting in a different character.

I had long ago seen 孑 (jié) as the left half of characters like 孫 (sūn; grandson) and 孔 (kǒng; hole), but had incorrectly imagined that it was simply a variant of 子 (zǐ) when 子 served as a component part of another character, similar to things I touched on here.

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

Thank you, Steve.

Your company's insanely great products ignited mine and many others' enthusiasm.