News archive
Release notes for every version of KTdict, from the newest update back through the posts preserved from the original site, with their original screenshots and videos.
The reader view can now be resized all the way to full screen, which makes long articles and scanned pages far easier to work through on iPad and Mac.
This release also carries a round of interface polish and bug fixes across all devices.
Fixed an issue where the flashcard trainer ignored your settings, so review sessions again follow exactly the options you chose.
A quick follow-up to 4.8 resolving critical issues reported after the redesign.
KTdict 4.8 brings a modernised interface across every device, designed around a clearer, distraction-free study environment.
The new look follows the liquid glass material introduced with this year's Apple platforms. Panels and toolbars float above your content rather than boxing it in, and they are genuinely translucent — in the reader above, the scanned page carries on through the dictionary panel sitting over it, so you never lose your place on the page you are working through.
The release also adds full-text translation, so a whole passage can be translated at once rather than word by word, together with performance improvements throughout the app.
Master Chinese characters with animated stroke order diagrams. Every character now shows exactly how it is written, stroke by stroke, in the correct order.
Handwriting is what makes characters stick, and having the stroke order next to the meaning means you can practise the moment you meet a new character.
A maintenance release with bug fixes across the dictionary, reader and trainer.
User interface improvements throughout the app, together with an updated dictionary dataset.
A maintenance release following 4.3.
Improved search algorithm: the most frequent words now show at the top of the results, so the word you were probably looking for is the first one you see.
We are happy to announce that KTdict is now available for Mac. This is a fully native Mac application with all the bells and whistles you can expect:
KTdict 4.2 also brings enhancements to the iPhone and iPad version — including undo functionality on those devices.
We are happy to announce that a major new update of KTdict is available in the App Store:
Thanks to everyone who provided feedback on the new version so far — we published two small updates (4.0.1, 4.0.2) to address some rough edges, like a Chinese font size that was too small.
Happy New Year everyone!
We celebrate with a new version of KTdict, bringing it up to date with iOS 13 — including dark mode.
Enjoy!
Got a new iPhone? KTdict 3.1 is out with native support for iOS 12 and the newest iPhone models.
In addition, KTdict 3.1 comes with the following new features:
We are happy to announce a new member of the KTdict family: KTdict C-F is a Chinese–French dictionary, similar to its siblings KTdict C-E (Chinese–English) and KTdict C-D (Chinese–German). KTdict C-F is based on CFDICT, a French translation of CC-CEDICT provided and maintained by volunteers of Chine Informations.
KTdict C-F comes with the same features as the other KTdict versions:
The free version is supported through advertisements. A one-time in-app purchase will disable all advertisements and enable additional features:
KTdict C-F is localized into French, in addition to English and German. With the next update, the other versions of KTdict will get the French localization as well.
I hope many French-speaking Chinese students and travellers to China will find this useful!
We just submitted KTdict 2.7 to the App Store — it should be available within a few days. This version brings support for the new, larger iPhones as well as support for iOS 8. Detailed list of new features:
Here is a video demonstration of KTdict on iPhone 6 Plus:
iOS 8 has a new feature: it is now easy to capture the screen of an iPhone or iPad as video. I created the following two clips. The first is intended as an app preview to reach new users, while the second demonstrates the new OCR feature.
Two major new features in this version: optical character recognition, and downloadable Chinese fonts.
The optical character recognition (OCR) module is based on the open source tesseract-ocr library. At the moment the OCR module is limited to printed black text on a white background — but we already find it very useful, for example to get a translation for something on the menu in a Chinese restaurant.
It is now possible to change the Chinese font in the settings. The fonts are downloaded from Apple's servers on demand.
Both new features are part of the free version at no additional cost.
The main new feature of this version is tone colouring. If enabled in the settings, KTdict will colour Chinese characters and pinyin based on tone. The colours used are fully configurable.
Full list of features:
A long-requested feature has arrived: the newest version of KTdict supports Chinese sound output through the speech synthesizer available in iOS 7.
Sound is available in three places:
KTdict now runs as a 64-bit application on devices with an A7 processor. This version requires iOS 7.
New versions of KTdict became available on the App Store today. The apps are redesigned to take advantage of the new look and features of iOS 7. KTdict still runs on iOS 6 and iOS 5, but it now definitely looks and works best on iOS 7.
While this is mainly a visual facelift on the iPad, the interface for iPhone and iPod touch went through a major overhaul. Navigation through the application is greatly simplified — for example, it now takes only a single tap to switch between the flashcard list and the dictionary.
In addition to the interface improvements and the visual facelift, KTdict has additional data from the Unihan database. When the Chinese characters of a word are displayed, KTdict now shows all meanings and readings of that character — not only the one used in this word.
Review of KTdict C-E and four other language apps in the Los Angeles Times.
Highlights:
“Whether you create the flashcards or rely on the expert information available through the iOS app, the KTdict is a comprehensive, easy to use Chinese-English dictionary.”
Los Angeles Times
“One of the best parts about this app is that everything is stored on your iOS device, and Internet connection is not required to use it.”
Los Angeles Times
This is a smaller update with the following new features, in addition to the usual bug fixes:
The new features require iOS 6, but the application continues to run on iOS 5 and above.
A nice feature about KTdict C-E on the Guangzhou blog City Weekend:
“This is the best Chinese-English translation app we've ever used. Simple and super convenient, it's saved us on several trips to the pharmacy. Start reading Chinese signs, ads and newspapers by exploring and experimenting with characters you've never seen before. The app's got over 70,000 entries and Chinese handwriting recognition, and you don't even need to be connected to the internet to use it.”
City Weekend
(Please note that the article is incorrect on one count: there is no Android version of KTdict C-E.)
The following post (in German) lists some useful apps for China — including KTdict:
KTdict 2.1 is available in the App Store:
We also spent extra effort on improving the overall stability of the app. Thanks to everybody who gave feedback and reported issues by email, through this website or on the App Store.
Future versions of KTdict will not support iOS versions below 5.0. If you have not done so yet, please take the time to upgrade your device to the newest version of iOS. It is worth it for many other features Apple has added to iOS as well.
I understand that this leaves users of the original iPhone, the iPhone 3G and the iPod touch without a way to upgrade KTdict — the current version will continue to work. But this decision allows me to use several new features added with iOS 5.0 and greatly simplifies testing, which benefits the vast majority of users (around 95% of iOS devices are on 5.0 or above).
KTdict 2.0 is out. It supports the iPhone 5 natively and carries multiple bug fixes for iOS 6.0.
But there is also a major new feature: an integrated Chinese reader. It lets you import Chinese texts, for example from a Chinese website, into KTdict. Tap a character and KTdict immediately looks up the word starting from that character in the dictionary.
I hope this proves a powerful tool for many people learning to read Chinese!
KTdict 1.9.1 is available. This is a maintenance release:
The last two items only affect users of the paid versions.
Thanks to everybody who helped with resolving these bugs.
It took longer than anticipated, but KTdict 1.9 is finally out.
This is a major under-the-hood revision to enable one major new feature: support for iCloud. For people with multiple iOS devices — and I think there are more and more of them — this allows the automated synchronization of
Additional enhancements are:
Hope most of you like it. Drop me a mail at ktdict@me.com or leave a comment here.
"That's Shanghai" magazine has an article on the iPhone. Glad to see that it features KTdict C-E among "free Shanghai-friendly apps":
This is encouraging for the work on the next version, which is in the process of getting wrapped up.
KTdict version 1.8 is available in the App Store. This is mainly a maintenance release and has the following improvements and bug fixes:
Thanks to everybody who provided feedback.
Version 1.6 of KTdict includes Apple's iAd in the free versions (the paid versions are ad-free, of course). The data from the iAd network provides one interesting insight: it is possible to see in which countries people are using KTdict — see the chart below.
This pretty much lines up with the downloads. It is a pity that iAds are only available in the US, as I am losing 88.9% of my potential ad revenue this way — the overall fill rate is about 2%: 25% in the US and 0% everywhere else.
I am very happy to announce that KTdict 1.7 is available in the App Store. This is a major update including:
I hope many of you will like the new features. Let me know if you run into any problems or have suggestions for future versions.
Version 1.6 of KTdict is out. It includes several important features:
What is not so nice: a critical bug made it into this version. The app crashes for certain English words. A fix was submitted to Apple on July 21st, so it should become available within a few days. My apologies to everybody affected by this issue — the emails and comments I get on the App Store show that many people rely on KTdict for day-to-day use. I will definitely be more careful in future when making changes to the core search engine.
New versions of KTdict C-E and KTdict+ C-E are available (KTdict C-D will follow very soon).
Both the free and the paid version have a further enhanced search algorithm: speed is improved and the relevance of results is better. It is also now possible to delete words from the search history. The dictionary database is updated to the newest version of CC-CEDICT. As the age rating of KTdict is now set to 12, I could include an uncensored version of CC-CEDICT — some of the previous versions had a few words removed.
The paid version has the following extra features:
KTdict now requires iPhone OS 3.0 — I assume most people upgraded their iPhone or iPod touch in the meantime, so this doesn't cost me too many potential users.
Let me know what you like and don't like about the upgrade.
Below is an updated download trend for KTdict C-E, the free version of my Chinese–English dictionary. Two interesting observations:
Total downloads of KTdict C-E are now over 160,000. From the updates I can estimate that roughly half of the people downloading KTdict keep it installed on their iPhone or iPod touch.
With OS 3.0, Apple added parental controls to the iPhone. Therefore each application in the iTunes App Store needs an age rating from 4+ to 17+ (true adult content cannot be sold through the App Store at all).
During the submission of an app, the developer has to answer questions like: "Does the app contain nudity?", "Does the app contain obscene language?", "Does the app contain simulated gambling?" Based on the answers, iTunes calculates the age rating.
Two weeks ago I submitted a bug fix for KTdict C-D (there was an error handling the German "ü" correctly, which I realized after some bad reviews). I thought a dictionary shouldn't be a problem for children, so I answered all of these questions with "none". That gives an age rating of 4+, which is no change from the current version.
One week later, the surprise: Apple rejected the update due to "profanity" and "mature/suggestive themes". Okay — they obviously found some dirty words in the dictionary. As I didn't want to censor, I changed the age rating by moving "profanity" and "mature/suggestive themes" to "mild". This increases the age rating to 9+.
One week later, the next surprise: the app was rejected again. This time the reason is "sexual content in Chinese". So now I change that setting too, which makes KTdict C-D a 12+ app. I hope Apple will release the update this time, so it finally reaches my customers.
I must say that I find this pretty annoying. It would be okay with me if Apple said: we looked at your app and think it should be rated 17+. But right now I have to play trial and error to see what Apple thinks about an app. Because of the review process, each trial costs one week.
Anyway: I hope to get the update out soon, and not to lose too many customers between four and nine years of age.
New versions of KTdict, my Chinese–English and Chinese–German dictionaries for the iPhone and iPod touch, are online. The version numbers of KTdict C-E (a free Chinese–English dictionary), KTdict+ C-E (a Chinese–English dictionary with an integrated flashcard trainer) and KTdict C-D (a Chinese–German dictionary with an integrated flashcard trainer) are now all increased to 1.3.
The following improvements have been implemented:
The updates are free for all existing owners of KTdict C-E, KTdict+ C-E or KTdict C-D. I hope you enjoy the additional features and the increased speed.
New versions of KTdict are ready and available in the App Store:
Features added to all versions include:
The major new feature of the paid versions KTdict+ C-E and KTdict C-D is a flashcard trainer. You can add words from the dictionary as flashcards as well as adding words manually. This provides an easy, mobile way to memorize new vocabulary.
After one week in the App Store, KTdict C-E reached 10,000 downloads. It is currently the most downloaded app in Taiwan and number two in Hong Kong.
Below is the download trend so far by country. It's amazing to see how Hong Kong and Taiwan took off in the last four days. I am very curious how this will continue.
After a longer than expected wait, my dictionary programs KTdict C-E and KTdict C-D are now available for download in the iTunes App Store.
KTdict C-E (Chinese–English) is free, while KTdict C-D (Chinese–German) costs $3.99 / €2.99.
I submitted two iPhone applications to the iTunes App Store: KTdict C-E and KTdict C-D. The first is a Chinese–English dictionary, the second a Chinese–German dictionary. They are based on the following components:
I use both programs myself several times a day and can hardly imagine getting along without them. They should be available in the App Store in about two weeks.
