Society

Chinese Apple fan develops iPhone input method

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2010-11-13 13:24

HARBIN??- "We are trying to tell Steven Jobs to 'please pay more attention to Chinese users' feelings,'" said Guan Yi, one of the developers of the new Chinese language input method for the iPhone.

"I'm a big fan of Apple, as well as a fan of Jobs," said Guan, who bought an iPhone in January 2008 and found it "perfect, but not good at Chinese language input methods."

Steven Jobs is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Apple.

"The original input method was time-consuming and inconvenient. That's why I was determined to develop the research work for it," said the professor, who then set up a Web Intelligence Input Method Research Team as part of the Web Intelligence Research Office of Language Technology research Center at Harbin Institute of Technology.

After two years and with 12 people's efforts, the "Web Intelligence Input Method (WI-InputMethod)," hailed by netizens as "the most awesome input method," was put online for free downloading on Thursday.

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Within one day it had been downloaded by iphone users nearly 7,000 times. It also caused the temporary shutdown of the official website of the institute. The WI-InputMethod was designed to include a large number of phrases and has self-learning abilities to save users time in completing sentences. Additionally, the method also has the function to correct the mistakes in users' sentences.

"We are trying to speed up the typing. You can just type whatever you want to say for a while, and choose one sentence you really need from the sentences," Guan said, who was also one of the researchers of Microsoft's Chinese language input method, which was jointly developed by Microsoft and the Harbin Institute of Technology.

"People swarmed online to comment on it and we had received hundreds of comments from different websites," he said.

Users left messages online, saying it was "cool" and "smooth" to use .

Suggestions were also given online to his team, including making the characters larger and altering the arrangement of the keyboard. Some even encouraged them to develop an input method for the iPad, another leading product of Apple.

Guan said his team is, in fact, working on a Chinese language input method for the iPad.

Apple's latest smartphone, the iPhone 4, has been a bestseller and newsmaker in China's smartphone market since its first appearance in America last year. It has been one month since Apple launched the iPhone 4 series in the Chinese mainland market on September 25, yet demand shows no sign of abating.

The new language method is currently only available on the university's website, as well as being shared on major Chinese forums for Apple, but not available in the official Apple Store, which went online on October 26, he said.

The biggest difficulty for Guan's team was that Apple does not support third parties in developing software for its products, so developers need to outsource related programs for the iPhone and then develop input methods based upon this, which is legal, Guan said.

The team is planning to apply for a patent to protect their research results, he said.

"What we really hope is that Apple can accept our product and put it into the iPhone system ," said the fan.