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iPhone App Developer Spotlight: Boris Zhukov and SlovoEd

Another in my continuing series of interviews with iPhone application developers. Boris talks about "SlovoEd", but it's really a series of different dictionaries, as you'll learn. I highlight the terrific English/Spanish in the graphic below, but encourage you to search through their offerings for many different choices. To read the full set of interviews, please click on: The iPhone App Developer Interviews. If you're a developer and would like to participate, please drop me a note via the contact form on this site!

Q: You wrote SlovoEd dictionary. How long did it take you? How many lines of code is the program?

Development takes about 2 month and SlovoEd consist of about 30,000 lines of code.

Q: Tell us a bit about the application, including your target market and what problem or problems your application solves?

SlovoEd dictionary line for iPhone/iPod Touch contains 110+ dictionaries for 30 languages The most reliable linguistic dictionary content from world leading linguistic companies: Merriam-Webster, Oxford, DUDEN, PONS – to name a few and Paragon’s advanced SlovoEd dictionary engine have been combined to bring premium traditional dictionary content to iPhone users directly on the mobile device screen. Paragon's dictionaries under the SlovoEd engine allow iPhone users to take advantage of the iPhone's superb user interface, easy-to-use on-screen keyboard and many other device features, which work together to increase look-up speed even more over paper
dictionaries.

No Internet connection is required – simply download the dictionary once and use it on the iPhone/iPod Touch without any additional expenses. Audio modules contain nearly 40,000 live voice pronunciations prerecorded by native speakers, and having them directly on the iPhone helps to improve pronunciation and ease the mastery of a new language. The “History� feature shows the last 15 translated words, and the “Cross-Lookup� feature is an easy check of language comprehension.

Q: The iPhone Software Development Kit has been written about quite a bit, but I'd like to know your opinion: was it easy to get up to speed with this SDK? Is it sufficiently complete that you weren't stumped as you developed your application?

For our purposes SDK mostly is OK, but few things works different against our expectations, in one case native(Cocoa) functions were dramatically slowly compared to ANSI.

Q: Tell us about the experience of submitting your program to the iPhone Application Store and how long it took to gain approval. Did you have to demonstrate that you weren't accessing external data like the Address Book? What else was required for your app to show up in the public store?

Apple approval has taken some time, something about 1-2 weeks. We still have some difficulties with Apple & iTunes team approval of our applications (it takes too much time), but hope, that these will be solved soon. We are sure, our applications were tested to comply with Apple requirements, but we have not done any demonstrations - we only had to upload our titles to iTunes Connect backend.

Q: Did you develop all the graphics in the app yourself or contract with a designer to create the look-and-feel of your application?

All our graphics develop our in-house designer.

Q: How much is your application, and how did you decide on a price-point?

We have different prices for our dictionaries - $9.99, $14,99 and $24,99 depending on dictionary edition (Compact, Classic, Deluxe). Price point has been chosen according our understanding of mobile dictionaries market and iPhone apps average price. August sales show, that we have made right decision

Q: Are you inspired to write more iPhone applications? What's in the pipeline?

We are more than inspired to write more applications – we have made a good start and now planning to keep on our development for iPhone/iPod Touch devices. First, we would like to finish all our activities concerning dictionary development and its submission to App Store.

Q: If you're not a full-time iPhone application developer, what's your day job?

We are full-time iPhone application developer.

Great stuff, as always. Thanks for your informative answers, Boris. Need help with your iPhone? I got ya covered with that too, I have lots of free iPhone help online.

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