Rosetta Stone frontend for pocket pc

[foebea]

I am just starting out in Visual Basic, and have drafted up my plans for a freeware frontend program for use with a non freeware program called The Rosetta Stone. I use TRS to study French and Japanese, but as with many PPC users, I am rarely at my home computer or laptop.

On the TRS lanuage CD are a bunch of folders, all clearly labeled and such, with plaintext description and question files. I figure since it is not encrypted or hidden in any way, there is nothing wrong with me using that information since I paid for it. I have sent email to Rosetta Stone, but no response yet.

Anyway, I am designing a frontend, and was wondering if I am the only one in the world who would benefit from this program, or if there are other Rosetta users out there.

This program would not of course come with any language stuff, but you would just copy the folders from the Rosetta CD to a flash card, then tell the PPC program which directory to load from.

Here is a screenshot of what I have right now. Half of the buttons work, but I am still working on the image loading and cycling. Don't even get me started about the status of Kanji. That's tough.

http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/media/users/11899/draftscreen.gif


So, thoughts, suggestions, comments?

[dignow96]

I'm living in Kuwait now and trying my damnedest to learn Arabic and Farsi thru TRS. I would LOVE a PPC app to help me along. My wife and I are both studying the languages and both PPC users so this would be useful for the both of us. Please keep me posted on how this is going and if there is anything we can do to help. We don't program but are more than happy to test, review, throw money your way, whatever could make this happen. I'm fairly certain my email is on my profile here but just in case - [email protected].

[foebea]

Excellent! I'm not alone :D

Well the current situation, is I am on page 150 of the first VB book I have ever read. So forget Beta, don't even look at alpha. This is an exercise to help develop and direct my knowledge of the programming language.

At the very least, it will support what you see above. I will work endlessly to get it to support unicode (all character sets). The operation should be very like the original program.

My positive thinking version of the plan for the software goes something like:
front screen of program is list of lessens, similar to rosetta.
options screen to select base folder (in case more than one lesson present)
regular 'it speaks you click' lessons
it speaks, you type lessons
for kanji and other languages that Fitaly does not support, it speaks, you draw, then it shows you what it should look like.
(i think kanji recognition would be WAY beyond me)
and i will try to put in it speaks, you speak, it compares for accuracy. dont count on it though :)

One wierd bit that i have come up against so far is file formats.
The images are in PCT format, and the audio is in SWA format. Ive yet to find any VB controls out there which can handle these. In case I cant, then I will include instructions on converting en masse to mp3 and png or gif format and to resize the images. This may take the 300-400 meg cd down to about 200-300 megs. every little bit helps :wink:

Again, if all else fails, I will get the basics working and leave it at that.
I am still waiting on response from the company, but as it is the weekend, i think i will have to wait until at least tuesday for their opinion.

[dignow96]

Dude - you rock. I had no idea the complexity of a project you were suggesting. I love my tech, I know more than the average idiot on the street about how the HARDWARE works but I'm learning I'm even more clueless about software development then I thought. Even so if there is anything we can do to support let us know.

[dignow96]

One other thing if its at all usefull to you. All of the PPC devices in my signature are still in use in our family. My wife is using the 2215 (upgraded to WM2003SE) and the MPx200 (upgraded to SP2003), I'm using the Loox 720 occasionaly and my daily driver has now become my Jam (soon to be upgraded to 128MB RAM by PPCTechs). Our daughter uses the old Jornado to watch Barney/Disney vids while we out of the house. She's 2 so it keeps her occupied and using the stylus to get things moving ont he device is proving to have tons of auxillary benefits too - but I digress. Point being that we have a wide variety (PPC2002, WM2003SE, PPCPE, SmartPhone) of systems to throw this app at if you so choose.

[rocky_raher]

This is a wonderful idea! I've used Rosetta Stone Japanese, and am very impressed with it. I've just purchased Rosetta Stone Arabic, so I definitely recommend their product.

I use my PPC to kill idle time, like in checkout lines, so I would definitely love to practice a language using RS's drills.

Hopefully, the Rosetta Stone people will see that your program can only help them, by generating more demand for RS products. The ideal situation would be if they could someday bundle a PPC driver with their products. If their language programs could work on desktop or PPC right out of the box, that would be a great selling point.

[foebea]

I know it's been a long time since my last post here, but I have some good news and wanted to share.

I never did learn Visual Basic, I had a terrible time of it overall.
I picked up work on this application a couple weeks ago and now have it almost done. Currently it is being developed for the Playstation Portable.
Once that is finished I can to port it to the pocket pc. this should be really easy once i get started, just need to replace the control library and the graphics display libray.

If you have a Playstation Portable, you can check out the progress so far at http://www.psp-hacks.com/2007/04/02/rosettashard-initial-release/.

I am currently roughly 2 weeks away from the program being able to use most of the languages available from Rosetta Stone (no unicode yet)

[thierryb]

So and did you progress with your French and your Japanese during that 2 years with TRS ?

[foebea]

So and did you progress with your French and your Japanese during that 2 years with TRS ?

heh nope :)
that's why i need to code this app. I'm never at home to use it on my pc, i need to have it portable and with me.

[foebea]

Someone at the other forum says they had worked for rosetta stone company and when i had asked about them coding this for pocketpc and they said they werent interested, they already had code for pocketpc and palm programs. he says they didnt think there would be enough interest and abandoned them when they finished thier Web Based training.
:(