iPhone App Approved, should go live Friday
- Thread starter mikelove
- Start date
BTW, if you go into App Store right now and do a search for "pleco" the search results may show a couple of other Chinese learning apps that don't have Pleco in their names - those are NOT affiliated with us, they're just leeching off of our trademark in their search keywords, so please don't buy them thinking they're in any way Pleco-related. The official Pleco iPhone app will be listed as "Pleco Chinese Dictionary" - icon has a big traditional-character 魚 on it just as on our Palm / Windows Mobile apps.
garysaville
进士
Excellent news Mike! I'll let everyone in my Chinese class at university know during our exam tomorrow. That was much less painful than I had excpected out of a company like Apple.
Best,
Gary
-夏嘉瑞
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www.garysaville.net
Best,
Gary
-夏嘉瑞
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www.garysaville.net
Yeah, I have to say the whole thing was very smooth - a bit slow, but no complaints / change demands / etc, and the slowness is entirely reasonable when you consider how many screens worth of preferences / features / etc we have for them to review. So hooray for Apple on that - when you consider the relative market size / ease of development / lack of Java-related suckiness of iPhone versus Android, it seems the mandatory approval / lack of sideloading is a small price to pay.
(though I still think they should allow sideloading, if only as a way of reassuring worried developers that they'll have a fallback in the unlikely event that their app gets rejected - that's probably the single biggest reason why there are so few iPhone apps with a Pleco-esque level of complexity / customizability, people don't want to invest the time in developing something when they're not 100% certain they'll be able to release it once it's finished)
(though I still think they should allow sideloading, if only as a way of reassuring worried developers that they'll have a fallback in the unlikely event that their app gets rejected - that's probably the single biggest reason why there are so few iPhone apps with a Pleco-esque level of complexity / customizability, people don't want to invest the time in developing something when they're not 100% certain they'll be able to release it once it's finished)
character
状元
Congratulations! It's a very impressive product and deserves every success. Do you have any advertising planned for it (targeted Facebook ads, for ex)? Word of mouth/satisfied user demos will always be good sales drivers for Pleco, but 2 of 3 App Store sales charts are in part based on momentum.
Well, that and the need to price apps at $0.99 to get traction in the charts (the situation has changed a bit with in-app purchasing and the new top-grossing or whatever chart).mikelove said:
I hope Pleco for iPhone is so successful you can afford therapy for your irrational intolerance. :wink: Android fans will just have to appreciate that by creating an iPhone version, you're giving people a way to avoid buying a WM device to run it.
Yes, some advertising will definitely be forthcoming though we'll probably wait a few weeks before rolling that out (we can expect to be pretty high up in charts anyway at least initially). We're also planning to get a little more active in social networking - Twitter, Facebook fan pages, and possibly a blog for me to spout my anti-Android vitriol more openly - and make a bigger push for institutional adoption now that far fewer people need to buy $200 gadgets to run our software.
A successful iPhone version could easily fund an Android port in which I wouldn't necessarily have to be that heavily involved, so that's a reason for Android users to appreciate it. I'm honestly kind of underwhelmed by Android at the moment, though - even ignoring the development issues, I just don't like the design that much; it's probably my second least favorite mobile OS interface after S60. So there's little or no possibility of it getting the "love" that our iPhone version has, not from me at least. The desktop Windows / OSX versions are a different story on that front, however.
A successful iPhone version could easily fund an Android port in which I wouldn't necessarily have to be that heavily involved, so that's a reason for Android users to appreciate it. I'm honestly kind of underwhelmed by Android at the moment, though - even ignoring the development issues, I just don't like the design that much; it's probably my second least favorite mobile OS interface after S60. So there's little or no possibility of it getting the "love" that our iPhone version has, not from me at least. The desktop Windows / OSX versions are a different story on that front, however.
westmeadboy
榜眼
Hi Mike - many congrats on getting past the approval process. I was fearing it to be much longer!
Android UI - Out of interest, which of the UI flavours are you talking about?
Android UI - Out of interest, which of the UI flavours are you talking about?
Thanks!
Android-wise, my experience consists of a couple of simulators and a Droid I've played around with. Though I'll admit it's also the only one of the 6 big mobile platforms that I haven't actually owned / regularly carried around a representative of. (and it's going to be hard for anyone to convince me to give up my iPhone at this point)
Android-wise, my experience consists of a couple of simulators and a Droid I've played around with. Though I'll admit it's also the only one of the 6 big mobile platforms that I haven't actually owned / regularly carried around a representative of. (and it's going to be hard for anyone to convince me to give up my iPhone at this point)
westmeadboy
榜眼
Before buying the HTC Hero, I'd only played around with the simulator (which was painfully slow on my laptop at least) and so I was exceptionally "wowed" when I first played with the Hero. You should definitely play with HTC's Sense UI. Most people agree this is the best Android UI out there by some distance. I haven't tried any others, so can only assume they are right
The UI on any given device is not a great way to judge Android, because one of the strengths of Android is that it will support a multitude of UIs. Different users have different UI requirements. Don't like Sense UI? Then just turn it off and fall back to the vanilla UI. You don't need to root the device to do this. Its an option in the menu.
The Android UIs will only get better and better because the existing ones are still maturing. Having said that the Sense UI is awesome IMHO
The UI on any given device is not a great way to judge Android, because one of the strengths of Android is that it will support a multitude of UIs. Different users have different UI requirements. Don't like Sense UI? Then just turn it off and fall back to the vanilla UI. You don't need to root the device to do this. Its an option in the menu.
The Android UIs will only get better and better because the existing ones are still maturing. Having said that the Sense UI is awesome IMHO
But that's also part of the problem - a non-standard UI means your software has far fewer standard elements to play around with, greatly increasing the learning curve. Between the iPhone's email client, web browser, and system settings screens, just about every major portion of our iPhone interface looks and functions similarly to some other screen that iPhone users have already gotten familiar with. The standardized Android UI elements are very disappointing - not nearly as mature / slick / consistently-used as Apple's - and thanks to HTC et al skinning the UI, even those few standard elements aren't nearly as well drilled into Android users' heads as Apple's are. (of course it does free us from the need to tweak our own custom-developed UI elements to resemble Apple's so as to piggyback on that user knowledge, but that's not really a worthwhile tradeoff)
westmeadboy
榜眼
By UI, I'm talking about the Home screens, system settings etc. AFAIK, when you are running an app, the app will look pretty much the same whichever device you are using. I've never seen app-feedback where users report a visual UI problem on one device but not another.
"fewer standard elements to play with" - of course, there are a huge number of standard elements to play with in Android. I suppose potentially HTC might want the default colour of buttons to be a slightly darker shade of grey, but this is not a problem for anyone. I would still call those "standard" elements.
But your general point about having a consistent look and feel is something (obviously) encouraged by Google to developers. Is that something enforced by the Appstore? Sometimes it is necessary to break-from-the-norm. The web is a good example of this. Windows is another. Neither are doing too badly
"fewer standard elements to play with" - of course, there are a huge number of standard elements to play with in Android. I suppose potentially HTC might want the default colour of buttons to be a slightly darker shade of grey, but this is not a problem for anyone. I would still call those "standard" elements.
But your general point about having a consistent look and feel is something (obviously) encouraged by Google to developers. Is that something enforced by the Appstore? Sometimes it is necessary to break-from-the-norm. The web is a good example of this. Windows is another. Neither are doing too badly
Oh I know the UI in-app is the same, but those home screens / settings / etc use different UIs and the jump from one to the other seems like it might confuse people. On iPhone everything is built from more or less the same pieces that third-party apps use.
I wasn't suggesting Android was short on UI controls, merely that they didn't seem to be as developed / powerful as their iPhone equivalents, at least from the API manuals I've read / fooling around I've done with them. The application-specific UI in general also has kind of an ugly look, to my eyes at least - too much like S60, actually, which I'm also not a fan of. Lots of basic iPhone interface concepts like drilldowns / single-row toolbars / tab bars on the bottom of the screen are either missing, non-standard or much less elegantly-executed on Android - Android's toolbar equivalent feels chunky and intrusive.
I'm not a big fan of the built-in Chinese fonts either (see ldolse's comments here), and it seems like bringing our own is a real hassle (can't be referenced from resource files, e.g.).
I wasn't suggesting Android was short on UI controls, merely that they didn't seem to be as developed / powerful as their iPhone equivalents, at least from the API manuals I've read / fooling around I've done with them. The application-specific UI in general also has kind of an ugly look, to my eyes at least - too much like S60, actually, which I'm also not a fan of. Lots of basic iPhone interface concepts like drilldowns / single-row toolbars / tab bars on the bottom of the screen are either missing, non-standard or much less elegantly-executed on Android - Android's toolbar equivalent feels chunky and intrusive.
I'm not a big fan of the built-in Chinese fonts either (see ldolse's comments here), and it seems like bringing our own is a real hassle (can't be referenced from resource files, e.g.).
Congradulations Mike,
You made a lot of students at DLI very happy. I remember reading that the first edition will not have the capacity to create flashcards. Is that correct? and if so when will that feature be added? That feature is really critical for the students here. Also I've heard the school will eventually transition to issueing Itouchs, which will be great for both students and Plecodict. Thanks again.
You made a lot of students at DLI very happy. I remember reading that the first edition will not have the capacity to create flashcards. Is that correct? and if so when will that feature be added? That feature is really critical for the students here. Also I've heard the school will eventually transition to issueing Itouchs, which will be great for both students and Plecodict. Thanks again.
True, flashcards will come a couple of months later - not a difficult port from Palm/WM, but we needed to drop something to get the software out ASAP and flashcards were relatively modular. There is a "wordlist" feature, though, and you can import files created with that into our Palm/WM flashcard system to keep doing your vocabulary reviews on those.
estudiando
探花
Congrats and Merry Christmas!!!