I took the langalot iphone app out into the wild for four days of testing. It worked great! I had data roaming off the whole time and when I got free wi-fi, I would synch up the app. I doubled the number of saved words and spent a lot of time studying the new words while immersed in the language at the same time.

The application that I whipped together to provide offline dictionary access was also indispensable. I used it almost exclusively instead of my Franklin electronic German dictionary. I could look up a word and save it without any internet access (the regular langalot app requires internet access to search for words and sentences). Then when wi-fi was available, I synched it to the langalot servers and then the new words and sentences were saved in my account. We’re definitely going to release it, just need to package it all up and make it work for more than one user and language. We’ll call it “Langalot Street” or something along those lines…it doesn’t provide any of the learning or messaging of the full app, but when you’re on the street in a foreign country or in a classroom and don’t necessarily have internet access, it will let you look up words and sentences and save them offline. And we’ll add a few other features to make it an even better tool.

The immersion experiment with Langalot was a success. It definitely gave us some ideas on tweaks that will make it even better!

In other news, the new site design is up at xblabs.com.