iPhone Hope

mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
So I've been playing around with Pleco's new iPhone a bit for the last week (in between coding/debugging sessions, of course), and I'm actually starting to think that it might not be completely ridiculous for us to consider a native iPhone version. As long as you're not worried about the possibility of frying your phone or voiding your warranty with an unofficial firmware update, it's not really all that difficult to set up an iPhone to install third-party applications, not too much more so than the already-pretty-hairy process of installing software on Palm or Pocket PC anyway. And programming-wise, the interfaces and capabilities are so similar to regular OS X (particularly in the font department, Apple's international text engine appears to be fully intact) that porting from regular Mac OS to iPhone would be no more difficult than porting between Windows and Pocket PC.

The main question is how we get around the legal problems of, first of all, requiring somebody to do something which probably voids their warranty in order to install our software, and secondly, releasing a product which Apple might deliberately and permanently disable the use of in a firmware update. We'd probably handle both with some sort of a very angry-sounding legal disclaimer people had to click through (or, if the lawyers really went crazy, sign and fax in to us), perhaps bundled with a pledge to allow a free switch to another platform in the event that Apple did disable third-party software within, say, one year of purchase. But definitely there'd be a healthy dose of lawsuit-proofing.

Still, if we can get around those problems and if the installation/development tools mature a bit in the next year or so an iPhone port is certainly something we could consider. Design-wise it would probably follow pretty closely from the Pleco Mini interface we're working on for WM Smartphone and its ilk, i.e. a palette-less main screen (tap a button to switch between list and definition, go to a separate screen for character input), fewer options in general, possibly some flashcard modes missing, etc, and since Hanwang most definitely does not make a version of their handwriting recognizer for iPhone we'd have to either port the old Motorola one (which we now have source code for) to it or just release it without handwriting. But in general, assuming we're going to do a Mac OS version anyway a native iPhone port seems like it would really be pretty comparable work-wise to a web-based iPhone version, and in fact probably a good bit easier than a BlackBerry port.
 
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hairyleprechaun

状元
As many flaws as I keep finding with the iPhone (coming from using an HP iPAQ hx2495 that has most of the bells and whistles anyone could want from a Pocket PC, and has a SD card and Compact Flash, two things that Apple is mean not to include, unless of course they are planning on releasing a new iPhone with more storage capacity that they want you to buy . . . rant . . . rave . . . ) I still love how sleek it is, the size and clarity of the screen, and the fact that it includes a cell phone. As far as I am aware no other cell phone out there really compares at the moment. And the thought of carrying around one less electronic device and finally having a cell phone with a screen sized big enough for Pleco keeps making me think of the iPhone and that I would probably purchase it if I could get Pleco on it (and then I think, are you crazy Apple? No stylus? What is wrong with you Steve Jobs . . . rant . . . rave . . . )

Anyway, I would probably jump on the bandwagon just to reduce weight and for the convenience of finally being able to put Pleco in my pocket. I would definitely be using Pleco 20-30 times more than I use it right now, and that is already a lot, if it was in my front pocket and not in my backpack.

Darrol
 
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gato

状元
secondly, releasing a product which Apple might deliberately and permanently disable the use of in a firmware update.
Click to expand...
An Apple executive has said that they are not going to deliberately break third-party apps.

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/09/o ... pple-.html
Official: Apple "Doesn't Hate" 3rd Party iPhone Software


And look: the new iPod Touch supports Chinese for display, but not yet in its keyboard -- though the keyboard supports Japanese. Doh!
http://www.apple.com/ipodtouch/specs.html
Languages
* English, French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Russian, and Polish
* International keyboard support for English, UK English, French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Polish, and Portuguese
 
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gato

状元
A current list of "native" iPhone applications. :p

http://www.modmyiphone.com/nativeapps/the-list/
The List

This eBook reader looks awesome. Nice font.
http://www.modmyiphone.com/nativeapps/books/

books.jpg
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
gato - Apple actually just backtracked on that executive's comments, see http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/shoptalk/update-iphone-updates-will-probably-break-iphone-apps-298989.php. Pretty thin support to go on in any case, we're not going to be able to get around the substantial risk that we might go to the trouble of developing an iPhone port only to have it become useless a few months later unless Apple announces an official developer kit. But the investment of resources really does seem like it would be pretty small once we'd developed a regular Mac OS port, particularly since our first iPhone release would likely have a barebones feature set (i.e., a dictionary and nothing else) in order to determine whether or not there was actually a critical mass of people willing to risk destroying their $400 iPhones just to run Pleco on them.

And the iPhone already seems to have Arial Unicode built-in, I haven't actually tried Chinese-language web surfing on it yet but font-wise it should be able to display Chinese, Korean, and any other character set you throw at it even with the current firmware.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Sadly, it seems like the iPhone development situation has gotten considerably worse with the new ROM update:

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/iphone/iphone-re+reviewed-verdict-dont-buy-302075.php

It's still not entirely clear whether the bricking / disabling of third party applications with the new ROM was a deliberate move on Apple's part or just an unintended byproduct of other changes, but we'll probably know in a few weeks when it becomes clear whether or not the new ROM version can still be hacked as thoroughly as the old one. If Apple is in fact intentionally blocking people from writing 3rd-party applications for iPhone then unfortunately there's really no way we could develop a native iPhone version even as a quick port from Mac OS; it's just too risky. (though a web-based version is still a possibility, of course)
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
That by itself probably won't be a big problem, actually; they seem to still be able to flash the old firmware onto it, and since that firmware would perfectly happily accept/install a non-encrypted firmware update, it should still be possible to put whatever hacked firmware you want on it by bootstrapping on the old firmware. The real worry is what this means for the iPhone 2; if they build encryption into the hardware they could make it almost impossible to re-flash it with new firmware. Though even in that case there'd probably be a security hole / buffer overflow / etc somewhere in the system that would enable them to hack it.

Personally, I'm getting more and more impressed with the BlackBerry Curve; it's not as multimedia-friendly or as cool-looking as the iPhone, but it's just as easy to use, has far more functionality (not to mention a vastly superior keyboard), gives you a choice of carriers and even supports UMA (which isn't getting enough publicity but is going to completely reshape the mobile industry in the next year or two). And unlike Palm and Pocket PC, it almost never crashes. Porting Pleco to Java wouldn't be easy, but given how downright evil Apple seems to be getting lately I'd feel a lot better about putting in the extra effort to develop a BlackBerry version than I would supporting iPhone.
 
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panamajack

举人
Disappointing posturing by Apple with the 1.1.1 firmware update, but I personally see it as a precursor to an Apple controlled SDK, perhaps coming out alongside Leopard this month (?)

Commentators have noted that a controlled environment where Apple approves and sells 3rd party apps for the iPhone would fit in perfectly with their iTMS ecosystem. It's worked OK in other areas (Nintendo and other game consoles), maybe it could work with the multitouch OS ?

As a consumer, I'd welcome Apple putting some quality control on apps, just as long as they let both big and small compete! I probably prefer Apple not being QUITE so maniacally controlling, but hey, it is the Stevie Wonder show.
 
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hleperlier

举人
you have probably seen the news on October 17 that Apple will release an SDK for the iPhone.

Funny, it seems to have been removed from the main hot news section, including archives. It can be found however in the developers' section at http://developer.apple.com/iphone/devce ... y_apps.php

Mike, I presume this can open possibilities for Pleco. Could finger input work well with Pleco and the iPhone?

羅維文
Henry :)
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
We think so, the main question is how restrictive the SDK is and whether or not we can get the necessary licenses (most importantly a handwriting recognizer) lined up for it. But if the SDK is in line with other less-freewheeling-than-Windows systems like Symbian/BlackBerry and doesn't require us to distribute software through iTunes, I'm pretty confident we could get the licensing issues worked out; heck, with the number of people asking for a BlackBerry version I imagine even a handwriting-less Pleco for iPhone would sell pretty well. So hopefully within a few weeks after they release that SDK we'll have a good idea about the prospects for Pleco on iPhone.
 
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ipsi

状元
At the moment, I mostly use Pleco in a way that doesn't depend on a touchscreen. It would be a pain if it lacked one (Looking up characters I don't know is one of the prime reasons I bought it, but I don't do much of that at the moment), but by and large I don't use it in a manner that *requires* a touchscreen (that your interface does is annoying, but technically fixable). Which basically amounts to flashcards, looking up stuff in E->C, and looking up via pinyin in C->E.

Also, totally not interested in an iPhone version (unless an unlocked GSM version comes out, and then maybe).
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
We've thought about switching to an interface that doesn't require a touchscreen, but we haven't yet figured out a way to do it without requiring long sequences of button presses to get anything done - there are just way too many options, if you look at other PDA dictionaries like Beiks et al they can get away with much simpler interfaces because all you're really doing most of the time is keying in words you want to look up, but in Pleco between the cross-referencing and multiple input methods and flashcards and list sort orders and having multiple dictionaries for the same language and so on there's just too much going on to make things really keyboard-friendly.

The eventual Pleco Mini design for S60/BlackBerry/whatever-we-end-up-supporting will have to fix this but will likely drop a bunch of features in the process; for full-version Pleco there's only so much we can do.
 
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ipsi

状元
Yeah. I still think there's a reasonable amount that could be done to make Pleco more keyboard/non-touchscreen friendly, but it would probably take a lot of work (in the case of Palm, it would basically involve writing your own GUI code and not letting Palm anywhere near the keyboard or pen-(up/down) events), and would significantly differ between platforms... Maybe it just wouldn't be worth it? And I've got no idea of how cumbersome it would be to only be using a keyboard + trackball (or 5-way style device) to get around.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
It's more a question of changing device UI models, we don't want to go in and completely overhaul the interface and then two years later even MIcrosoft's using iPhone-esque touchscreens and we have to change it again; it's hard enough on our users to have to keep re-learning the flashcard system every time we release a new version, the more basic dictionary interface ought to stay reasonably consistent at least.
 
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Luhmann

举人
I'm wondering how long it will be before there is a Palm Emulator that runs on the iPhone? It seems like it shouldn't be so hard to build one, and it would give access to tons of legacy apps. Considering how well Windows can run on OS X using various virtualization programs, why not virtualization on the iPhone?
 
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ipsi

状元
I guess that'll depend on how much Access wants to give anyone and everyone the ability to run Palm OS programs on something as popular as the iPhone.

A bigger problem may be the lack of expandable memory if Pleco keeps acquiring dictionaries :). That, and a lack of a stylus. A lot of Palm OS apps would really struggle without one I think :).

But if Garnet is ARM-native but can still run 68K apps just fine, then I see no reason why it couldn't be done on the iPhone. Though a lot of apps would be useless. I'm thinking particularly of launchers and phone apps here.
 
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maxhastings

Member
Hi,

I am a student in Beijing studying Mandarin. To cut a long story short one of my classmates uses Pleco and after trying out his PDA for a while I think it is just what i need - especially the character input function as lessons are now moving into no English and no PinYin mode!! Also, I keep seeing Chinese characters on signs, subtitles, papers etc and think I've seen it before but just can't remember what it is and the software would be ideal.

So, I went in search of a PDA in one of the local computer malls, saw the iPhone and wanted one for all the reasons already stated - I am a Mac use etc.. - but of course the one thing it doesn't have is the main thing I need. My choice of PDA will depend upon whether an IPhone version of Pleco with character input makes it onto the shelf within the next year. Otherwise, the search will have to start again. Any ideas?

btw - i saw a lot of Chinese/English electronic dictionaries and software and none as good as Pleco so i will be a customer fairly soon - provided I can make up my mind on PDA.

Thanks
 
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